


all i ever wanted was a life in your shape

by limerental



Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Banter, Brief Breeding Kink, Dialogue Heavy, Discussion of Abortion, Emetophobia, F/M, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Magical Pregnancy, Mpreg, Multi, Polyamory, Unplanned Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-24
Updated: 2021-01-24
Packaged: 2021-03-15 23:01:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28946352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/limerental/pseuds/limerental
Summary: Jaskier accidentally fumbles into and activates one of Yennefer's private workings and finds himself expecting far more than her dark and terrible wrath.aka the much-requested Geraskefer mpreg
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion, Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg, Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg, Jaskier | Dandelion/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg
Comments: 32
Kudos: 358





	all i ever wanted was a life in your shape

**Author's Note:**

> title is a reference to strawberry blond by mitski
> 
> some of this fic I wrote while looking through my fingers and yelling because I hate thinking about pregnancy haha why did i choose to write an mpreg fic hehe
> 
> this does not lean graphically into pregnancy details because i frankly hate them!
> 
> any errors are mine! i got tired of looking at this
> 
>  **content warning** for pregnancy, abortion discussion, various pregnancy related body horrors, nausea/vomiting, near-death experience, yennskier got away from me and there is some brief breeding & pregnancy kink (like a sentence)

“Ah, cock,” said Jaskier dazedly as he lay in a pile of smoking rubble on the stone floor of the laboratory. He’d made quite the racket when he took his clumsy spill so would not be lucky enough to slink out of this unscathed and blame the mess on the vermin he had definitely heard skittering about in the castle all night.

He would have to face the music, as it were.

The atmosphere shifted and crackled, condensing with the weight of an oncoming storm.  
He could distinctly hear Yennefer sweeping up the spiral stairs, her voice pitched in an argument.

“No I will not go _soft_ on him, he should know-- who else could it be? Do you know some other absolute idiot who would mess about in a mage’s--”

Jaskier’s head still thumped with the vicious headache that had driven him to mess about in said laboratory in the first place searching for a hangover cure. Gone a bit too hard on the wine the evening before, but who could blame him?

He and Geralt had been headed for a local midsummer festival in Aedirn before their journey was so rudely interrupted by a chance meeting with Yennefer. Geralt had promptly followed her like a whining stray dog back to her lodgings in Vengerberg, and Jaskier had had no choice but to trail after him or be left behind.

He thought morosely of torchlight in a dirt-packed square and raucous laughter and long nights of barefoot dancing. He pouted at the cobwebbed ceiling.

His temples throbbed.

Rather than attempt to extract himself from the tangle of assorted magical accoutrements he had fallen among, he adjusted his sprawl to a more dramatic arrangement of limbs and sighed deeply.

Perhaps Geralt would take pity on him and sweep him back onto the road. Perhaps he would insist that Jaskier require a healer for his aggrieved state, and he would simply have to emphasize that _oh no, my dear friend, oh I feel quite alright, but perhaps… a spot of folk music would be a soothing balm to these dreadful wounds… a touch of ale and cheese and dancing at say… a local midsummer festival?_

“--not broken any instruments beyond repair or I’ll see about returning the same for his precious instrument. No, not that dainty Elven thing he struts about with, Geralt. Oh, don’t play coy or I’ll see about placing his bollocks on his--”

The heavy laboratory door slammed open and smacked against the opposite wall, small puffs of plaster sifting down from the ceiling. Jaskier sagged, letting out a long breath and pretending not to be watching under his eyelashes as Yennefer of Vengerberg strode into the room, followed quickly by a hunched and mumbling Geralt of Rivia.

He had to have woken them, dawn having barely broken when he himself groaned awake in his borrowed, dingy room with the warring discomforts of a need to piss, an agonizing headache, and a cottony taste in his mouth reminiscent of a dead rodent having crawled there and died in his sleep.

Geralt certainly looked somewhat groggy, though not enough to put a dent in his usual tight-jawed surliness, but Yennefer may as well have stepped out of a ballroom, her perfect waves of dark hair falling across her bare shoulders, the dress she wore tickling her ankles, and her heeled boots looking equal parts elegant and menacing as she strode close enough that his vision narrowed to said boots alone, dangerously close to his fragile person.

“I know you’re awake,” said Yennefer and nudged him in the ribs far more forcefully than necessary. Jaskier squeaked and curled down against further blows and promptly pricked himself on something in the pile of nonsense he found himself lying in.

“Now he’s bleeding,” said Geralt with none of the anxious, worried inflection that Jaskier felt such a statement about a dear friend deserved.

“Serves him right,” said Yennefer. Thankfully rather than kick him again, she swept a hand and magicked away the mangled instruments and crystals and broken glass that Jaskier had been lying in. “He’ll be repaying any damages, you know. For the rest of his feeble little lifespan, most likely. This equipment is highly esoteric and not so easily--”

As she cut herself off sharply, the atmosphere drew tighter around them, his ears popping. Yennefer’s lips pursed to a thin line as she appeared to come to the realization of what exactly had been damaged. When her violet gaze swept down to meet his, he felt a thrill of fear low in his stomach. Or perhaps that was just the sudden bout of nausea.

“Yen--” Geralt attempted but was promptly cut off by a raised hand.

Sweet, noble Geralt. How lovely to have known and befriended him. Jaskier wished only that he be remembered as a small, bright spot in his otherwise dismal and boring existence. He allowed his skull to thunk back against the stone floor in acceptance of his fate and regretted it at once for the fresh swirl of pain and nausea it inspired.

“Do you know how long I have been perfecting that particular working, little poet?” asked Yennefer in a dark voice that slithered down the length of his spine.

“No,” squeaked Jaskier.

“Decades,” intoned Yennefer. “Long before your balls dropped.”

“Ah,” said Jaskier. He didn’t quite like the tone with which she spoke about his testicles. “I’m um-- dreadfully sorry to hear that. I’d be eternally and woefully grateful if you could--” She shifted her weight, emphasizing the long curve of her leg and sharp heel of her boot. Nausea stirred more intensely in his gut, and he dearly hoped she did not prod him again for fear that he would certainly vomit on the supple leather and face untold and terrible iterations of her unfailing wrath. “--eep, if you could forgive me my indiscretion and simply-- ugh, can we table this discussion for some other time? I’m feeling quite-- I’m indisposed.”

“You don’t yet know the meaning of indisposed,” said Yennefer.

“Right, right, that’s appropriately terrifying. I’ll just-- ah.” The pitch of the nausea increased, dark spots shimmering across his vision as he lay groaning on the cold floor.

“Yen,” said Geralt. Ah yes, there was the touch of worry that he was surely due. He may well be dying after all. In fact, it was beginning to feel as though he may expire before Yennefer could properly lift a hand to kill him.

Their voices rose together around him.

“Don’t try to convince me to go easy on him, Witcher!”

“Yen,” Geralt repeated. “What sort of working was it?”

“An important one,” huffed Yennefer. “And private. Highly complex. Though I hadn’t found the right activator for it. It should be completely inert.”

“He doesn’t look so good.”

“He’s hungover. Excessively.”

“His scent is--”

“Reeking of wine, yes, I don’t need heightened senses to experience that pleasant detail.”

“No,” said Geralt. “No, there’s something--”

“Pardon me,” breathed Jaskier as he found himself rolling to press his overly warm forehead to the cool stone. A clamminess had come over him, surely a prelude to his untimely end. “Sorry to interrupt your rousing banter, but I think I may--”

He managed to press himself to his hands and knees just as the nausea peaked, and he retched the meager contents of his stomach onto Yennefer’s pristine stone floor.

“Oh lovely,” mumbled Yennefer, and Jaskier suddenly found himself with a chamberpot propped under his chin as his stomach heaved. “I’ll be smelling that for a week then.”

“Yen,” said Geralt once more, this time near enough that he had to be crouching beside him. Ah, if only the Witcher could hold back his hair and mutter sweet platitudes to him as he evacuated every one of his insides from his mouth. Instead, a frowning Geralt simply squatted to examine him, hands dangling between his legs. Jaskier continued to puke heartily into the chamberpot, perhaps whimpering and gagging more pathetically than strictly necessary in the hopes of eliciting even a simple back pat.

“Idiot,” said Yennefer, reminding Jaskier of her alarming ability to read thoughts. He did not have the wherewithal at the moment to feel mortified. Dying had that effect on a person.

“Yen. What sort of working was it?” Geralt repeated once more.

“I don’t know that that’s any business of yours.”

“Tell that to Jaskier.”

“Jaskier, I don’t know that that’s any business of yours either.”

“ _Yen._ ”

Ah, his voice had gone soft and pleading, the sort of rare and gentle tone that Jaskier knew even the likes of Yennefer could not be immune to. Geralt’s skills of persuasion were unfairly advanced, and oh, how he longed someday to hear that pleading directed his way. Alas, it was not to be, for he would perish here in this horridly-furnished, drafty laboratory.

“Fine. Fine! It’s an adaptation of Agrippa’s Ingravesco, a stimulating work of spellcraft if you’re interested in--”

“I’m not.”

“Hmm, your loss. You may have learned something.”

“Get on with it, Yen.”

Jaskier found himself willing his body to die at a quicker rate, simply so he would not have to be subjected to more of their tedious bickering.

“This adaptation of the working required different variables be applied, namely the creation of an artificial vessel in order to safely contain the subject. And an accelerant, of course. Agrippa would not have considered that, the old cow. It’s abundantly clear how very little he cared for the suffering of women given his--”

“Yen!”

“It’s a pregnancy charm, Geralt,” snapped Yennefer. “One that doesn’t require the usual messy acts of copulation. Not bound by fertility or anatomy.”

“Right,” said Geralt. “Because you’re…”

“Barren,” said Yennefer. Jaskier would have been truly intrigued by this simmering hot gossip were he not distracted by the sharp feeling of his stomach attempting to hitch itself up his throat.

“You actually care about that?”

“Shut up, Witcher. I don’t know that you could possibly understand.”

“You’re right. My life’s not suited to a child. Neither is yours.”

“Ack,” was all Jaskier could manage.

“It hardly matters,” said Yennefer sharply. “The working’s been interrupted. I’m sure I was so close to a breakthrough on it as well. Your bard owes me more than he’s worth.”

“You say it wouldn’t have done anything? The working?”

“Yes, have you been listening? It’s inert. I hadn’t yet found an activator. These things are complex, Geralt. They require careful precision and mathematics or else one risks--”

“He’s pregnant,” said Geralt.

“Ah, fuck,” said Yennefer.

“Um,” said Jaskier, his hands trembling as he lifted a hand to wipe the back of his mouth. “Apologies if I’m mistaken, but did you just say--” A fresh wave of dry heaving interrupted him. The feeble pat between his shoulderblades that the Witcher offered did little to live up to his fantasies.

“Heightened senses,” said Geralt. “I can smell it.”

“Right,” sighed Yennefer. “Well that’s just wonderful. Wonderful!”

Jaskier had only a moment to think that he didn’t find that to be anything close to the proper choice of words for such a situation before his vision blacked out entirely.

* * *

Yennefer paced the length of the elaborate sitting room, bearing the look of a woman whose sanity was a quick breath from snapping. Her home in Vengerberg was a strange conglomeration of elegant manor house and stone fortress that she claimed to be “borrowing” from the local liege lord who Geralt knew may or may not be aware of said occupation.

She had paused in her pacing only long enough to thank the timid serving girl who brought in a tray of tea and scones. The tray sat untouched on a side table.

“You’re gonna wear out the rugs,” said Geralt, perched on an uncomfortable settee to watch her stride back and forth, back and forth.

“They’re my rugs,” said Yennefer with a stubborn jut of her chin, “I’ll wear them out if I like.” Despite her words, she did pause a moment in her pacing, her back to Geralt, black fingernails tapping on her crossed arms. “Is he--”

“Still asleep,” said Geralt.

The bedroom where they had settled the afflicted bard loomed directly above their heads, so listening for the quiet thrum of his heartbeat would have been no issue even if it were not already second nature. His friend got himself into mischief too often not to keep an ear out for him. Though this present mischief already seemed likely to top the rest.

Not long ago, the sounds above had changed, or more accurately, increased.

A second heartbeat, small and fluttering.

“They both are.”

Yennefer launched into pacing again, her dark curls bouncing across her shoulders.

“The acceleration worked, then,” she said. “That was a sticking point. The body endures unimaginable horrors throughout gestation, and I presume speeding the process up couldn’t be comfortable. Organs re-arranging and joints loosening and skin stretching and all that.” At the horrified look on Geralt’s face, Yen waved a hand. “All sorted, of course. I am a sorceress, you know. It should be a perfectly average pregnancy, if a fair bit shorter than the usual, if he chooses to allow it to progress.”

“He’ll have a choice?”

Yennefer reeled on him, a vision of nervous energy and alarming beauty. Geralt found something clenching in his stomach, struck by the feeble wish that he could soothe her anxieties.

“Of course,” she said with a furious sharpness. “Of course, he’ll have a choice.”

“Then, why wait? I strongly doubt Jaskier of all people would be interested in bearing a child. I’ve never met anyone more fastidious about avoiding bastards.”

“Do you even listen to me, Witcher?” Her voice spiked with a darker sort of fury as she advanced on him. “ _His_ choice. He may be a fool who has robbed me of decades of work in an instant, but I refuse to deny him his agency. It’s his body. He makes the choice.”

“Right,” said Geralt, feeling appropriately shamed.

“Besides,” she said with a sigh, “I was careful to place safeguards against miscarriage. The ordinary abortifacients will not work. I’ll have to be creative.”

“Shit.”

“I haven’t just been waiting,” said Yennefer, tapping the side of her temple with a long finger. “I’m considering solutions. There may be workarounds, but all involve his informed consent.”

She resumed her pacing with gusto, her speed blowing the steam that rose from the forgotten teacups.

“How does it work?” Geralt asked after a while. “The… child.”

“Don’t tell me your instructors forgot to teach you the basics of reproduction, Geralt.”

“Not much need for it,” he said. “Witchers are sterile. But that’s not what I meant.”

“Enlighten me.”

“The conception. Who’s the father? Is there even a father?”

Yennefer pointedly did not answer.

* * *

Jaskier woke.

He lay on a plush mattress rather than on a cold, stone floor, which was an improvement. A residual nausea crept in his gut and a headache still pounded in his head, which was not.

Not dead, then. Which also was not much of a comfort, as the memory of what had transpired in Yennefer’s laboratory filtered back to him.

He sat up from his sprawl across a pile of frilly decorative pillows and squinted at the sheer curtains of the four-poster bed. This was most certainly not the bedchamber which he had been occupying for the past few days. For one, his belongings were not scattered across every surface, the decor was significantly more opulent, and it did not reek of stale wine.

He did not have long to contemplate his change in lodgings before a narrow door set flush to the wall swung suddenly open, and Yennefer of Vengerberg appeared at the top of a cramped-looking flight of stairs. As Geralt sidled through the doorway behind her, Jaskier felt a dizzying lurch of dejavu.

Or perhaps that was simply his stomach reminding him that it had not yet tired of puking.

Noting his queasy expression, Yennefer acted quickly and snapped her fingers to summon a clean chamberpot into his lap just as he began to heave his guts out once more. Though Jaskier had been fairly certain there wasn’t a single thing left for his body to expel, it seemed deadset on making a rousing go of it.

When the wave of nausea had well-passed, he leaned his forehead against the rim of the chamberpot and groaned miserably, sparing a sidelong glance at his audience.

Yennefer stood with folded arms, looking peeved that his fits of vomiting dared intrude on her tight-packed schedule, and behind her, Geralt twitched with hints of unease, small tells that would not have been apparent to anyone without Jaskier’s status as a veteran of interpreting his Witcher’s moods.

“I was going to ask how you were feeling, but I expect the answer is poorly.”

“How kind of you,” said Jaskier, absent any sincerity. “Though it would have been kinder if you had killed me.”

“Is he always so dramatic?” she asked Geralt, who shrugged.

“I may yet perish,” he groaned. The chamberpot and its contents disappeared as he flopped backward among the decorative pillows, content to play up his misery as much as possible. “Are you here for some particular reason or simply to relish in my suffering?”

“What do you remember of what happened?” Yennefer asked. He had the distinct feeling of being a prey animal shivering in the grass as she slowly circled the four-poster bed.

“That laboratory of yours is an absolute hazard. I’m acquainted with several experienced lawmen at Oxenfurt, you know. I’m sure it must breach a dozen safety regulations. I should sue.”

“It’s a private space. If you hadn’t poked your idiot nose in places they didn’t belong, this wouldn’t have happened.”

“Mmm, likely story. For all I know, you may have invited me here in order to exact these twisted experiments on me.”

“You invited yourself here,” Yennefer deadpanned.

“Well, I couldn’t let Geralt waltz into certain danger without me,” he huffed. “I knew you were plotting something. This proves it.”

Yennefer rolled her eyes. “Are you done squawking? What else do you remember?”

“Geralt said--” Jaskier glanced at the Witcher who leaned against the plaster wall of the bedchamber.“That thing you said. Earlier. Is that um… tell me that was some kind of mistake?”

Geralt stared at him and stood in unnatural stillness, expression stony, and after a while, tipped his head in the way he did when listening carefully for something.

“Not a mistake,” said Geralt.

“Well then, that’s-- you’re certain? How? It could be a trick. A joke. Some sort of test. I wouldn’t put it past her.”

“The heartbeat,” he said, “I can hear it.”

 _“H-heartbeat?”_ Jaskier squeaked, his hands fisted in a particularly lacy pillow that he clutched in his lap. “Isn’t that um-- pardon my ignorance, but isn’t that a bit--”

“Early, yes,” said Yennefer. “The working was designed that way.”

“See! I told you she planned this, Geralt,” he gasped. “This is all part of her elaborate scheme to um-- torment me at length, I assume. She’s never liked me.”

“For good reason, you absolute buffoon of a man,” she gritted out. “The spell was not intended for _you_. No magician expects a fool to fuck up her working this badly.”

“Oh, then who was it intended for? Some other unwitting subject?”

He recalled the mention of her own barrenness, but such a thing made little sense to him. Why should someone like Yennefer want to endure anything so base and common? Especially when she clearly had the means to inflict it on someone else. And besides that, what need did she have of a child?

“My reasons are no business of yours,” said Yennefer. Ah, he’d forgotten again about her ability to dip into his thoughts. “Now. Enough of this. It doesn’t matter how this has happened, only what you choose to do next.”

“Me?” he asked. “Why me?”

“Jaskier, I swear between the two of you-- I’d like to be clear, you do understand what’s happened to you, yes? Do I need to be more explicit? Or are your sensibilities too delicate?”

“Oi, my sensibilities are not--” He let out a sharp breath through his nose, finding himself growing increasingly frantic. “I’m not a _complete_ dunce. I’ve been following along just fine, thank you very much. I’m um--” He gestured at his lower abdomen hidden behind the lacey pillow. He didn’t feel all that different, besides the rolling waves of nausea that had now settled mostly to the background. “-- in the family way. Apparently.”

“And you know what that means?”

“No!” he exclaimed, strained and edged with nervous laughter. “Not in the least! Why should I? This hasn’t exactly been a concern in my life until oh-- very, very recently.”

“It means,” said Yennefer as she seated herself at the end of the bed with her hands folded in her lap, looking strangely sedate, “that you alone can choose how you wish to proceed. You may think very little of me, but I would never do something so cruel as to deny someone their agency. If you desire to terminate the pregnancy, I will help you.”

“Well, I think my choice should be obvious, shouldn’t it?” said Jaskier, wincing over the word _pregnancy_ spoken so plainly. “I don’t want anything to do with this.”

Yennefer nodded.

“It may take some time,” she said. “The working was not designed with abortion in mind.”

“Great,” he moaned. “Just wonderful. And I’m just to sit here in the meantime?”

“Ah, what a difficulty, to lounge about and endure my boundless hospitality while I do all the hard work.”

“Oh-ho, so it’s not enough that I’m bearing your-- wait, hang on,” said Jaskier, “how does all of that work? Genetics-wise.”

“Asked the same thing earlier,” said Geralt. “She wouldn’t say.”

“It hardly matters,” huffed Yennefer. “You’ve made your choice.”

“Right,” said Jaskier. “Nothing suspicious about that, then. Is it even-- is it even human? And also, how would it even er… make an exit? Not the usual way, that’s for sure.”

“Could claw its way out,” said Geralt. “If it’s really inhuman, that is.”

“Very helpful, Geralt, thank you,” said Jaskier dazedly, feeling queasy once more.

“Nothing’s clawing out of anything. Or making an exit,” said Yennefer. “The working has a fair amount of safeguards in place, but I’m hopeful that--

“ _Hopeful_?” Jaskier’s voice raised several embarrassing octaves. “So you’re not certain that you’re capable of--”

“Of course, I’m capable!” Yennefer’s eyes gleamed with a shock of surreal violet. Utterly horrifying. “But with the timespan as accelerated as it is, I can’t guarantee how far you will progress before I have a solution.”

“How accelerated?” asked Geralt, straightening from his lean against the wall.

“It took barely an hour to hear a heartbeat,” she said. “Draw your conclusions from that.”

“Roundabout way of saying you don’t know.”

“Fine, yes. I don’t know. This wasn’t exactly something I had planned for.”

“Ah, so. Right then,” said Jaskier. He swallowed down a strong shiver of fear. “Can we revisit that making an exit thing then? In case of uhh… delays?”

Yennefer waved a hand.

“I’ll handle it,” she said. “What kind of sorceress do you take me for? I could always make you unaware. It would be painless.”

“You realize that being placed into a magical coma by someone who is not at all fond of me is not overly comforting, yes?”

“Do you distrust me so much?”

“When have you ever given me reason to trust you? You’ve been nothing but dismissive of me since we first met, and that wasn’t exactly what I’d call a picnic. I wouldn’t put anything past you.”

“Touche,” said Yennefer and drew away from the bed to stand, smoothing her hands down her dress. There was something odd about her expression for a moment, a small grimace of hurt, before she smoothed her face into her usual show of haughty boredom. “I’ll be working in the South Tower. Don’t disturb me, and do _not_ get into any more trouble. Amelia will be around for anything that either of you need.”

With that, Yennefer turned on her heel and swept back down the stairwell, leaving Geralt and Jaskier alone.

An uncomfortable silence stretched during which they did nothing but look at one another.

Geralt tipped his head to the side, listening.

“Quit _doing_ that.” Jaskier tossed the decorative pillow at the Witcher, which fell ineffectively to the floor, far short of hitting its target. He regretted it at once for how exposed he suddenly felt without the pillow in his lap.

With the feeling of exposure came trepidation to look down at his midsection, fearing that he would already see the telltale signs of his condition. Drawing a deep and shaky breath, he looked down. Nothing amiss. He’d been developing a slight paunch as age crept up on him, but he saw nothing but the usual belly rolls. How long would that last? His fingers twitched against the bed linens but did not give into the temptation to spread flat across his stomach.

“So you’re completely certain that this isn’t a very elaborate and cruel joke?” he asked.

Geralt sighed. “Don’t think I’m imaginative enough to make something like this up. And I don’t think Yen gives enough of a shit.”

“Suppose I’ll get my proof soon enough.” He stared morosely at his midsection. Maybe there was something to be said for being placed into a magical coma until all of this was over. “Do you think Yennefer really wants a child?”

“Can’t say,” said Geralt, flopping into a stiff-looking chair against the wall. “She’s never talked about it.”

“Do you do that? Talking? From what I’ve overheard, you two seem to spend most of your time… canoodling.”

It had been several years since their first fateful encounter in Rinde, and the pair of them had done plenty of canoodling indeed. But their entanglements had never lasted more than a week or so, at least as far as Jaskier was aware.

There were apparently many things neither of them knew about Yennefer of Vengerberg.

“We talk,” said Geralt. “Sometimes.”

“Mmm, passionate grunting and compliments in the heat of the moment _do not_ count, my friend. And yes, I have been privy to some very colorful language on your part. Sound carries in this place, you know. Dreadfully thin walls.”

The tips of Geralt’s ears blushed pink.

“I know her childhood wasn’t ideal,” he said.

Jaskier snorted. “Whose was? But that’s not a hard one to guess, given how prickly she is. Nobody that uptight felt much love as a child.”

“Could be she wants a chance to do better.”

“Idealistic,” said Jaskier. “Me? I don’t want children for that very reason. Repeating the sins of your father and all that. It’s inevitable. I’d be a dreadful parent.”

“You think so?”

“I’m excellent with children, Geralt. Did you know that I have half a dozen nieces and nephews? They’re a laugh. A much more rewarding audience than most adults. But I’m even more excellent at handing them back to their parents the moment I’m able.”

“Doubt you’d have to parent this kid. Yennefer’s the one who wants it.”

“Agh, Geralt, please don’t talk about it like it’s an actual… child.” Jaskier grimaced.

“It is an actual child. I can hear it.”

Something strangely melancholic in his friend’s tone made him pause.

“Geralt,” said Jaskier with softness, lifting his attention from staring at his belly button to meet the Witcher’s strange eyes, “have you ever thought about being a father?”

“Not in the cards fate dealt,” he said gruffly.

“What about your Child Surprise?” The young royal must be nearly ten now by his calculations. Geralt had made no attempts to return to Cintra since that ill-fated banquet years ago.

“Already has a family. Not interested in tearing another child from their home.” A tensed vein beat in Geralt’s jaw.

“Does Yennefer know about your Child Surprise?”

Geralt looked aside.

“She’d think differently of me. If she knew.”

“Eh, she’ll think differently of you for sure if she finds out somehow.”

“Then don’t tell her.”

“Very mature way of handling things, Geralt. Let me know how that works out for you.”

“And it’s mature of you to avoid calling yours an ‘actual child’?”

“Listen Geralt, I’m in shock! I’ve been afflicted! I’ve been dealt a considerable blow to my manhood and bodily autonomy! I can’t be held responsible for consistency in what I do or say for at least another day or two. Maybe not even until this is all over. Maybe not ever again.”

“Let me know how that works out for you,” the Witcher echoed, a spark of amusement in his expression.

“I hate you, you know. You’re the worst.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

"We should have gone to that midsummer festival. I would much rather be passed out in a buxom maidens lap."

"I wouldn't worry," said Geralt, looking decidedly worried. "Yen will handle it. Not long now."

*

"Can I help with anything?"

Yennefer startled, so absorbed in her work that she had not heard Geralt enter. It should not have been possible for a man his size to tread so softly. He loomed with awkward, gangly largeness in the doorway, looking disarmingly endearing in his wrong-footedness.

She assessed him for a moment, the loose dangle of his hands at his thighs contrasting the tension in his jaw. She knew he cared for the bard and had kept his companionship for many years. She had seen the man this harried and anxious before only once, during their first, eventful meeting in Rinde several years ago.

"You know how to devein mandrake, yes?"

The Witcher nodded, and Yennefer gestured to a stool at her cluttered workstation. He perched himself there without much hesitation and got to work. The task required a precision that his weathered hands were well suited to, the gnarled roots of the mandrake pinned between his scarred knuckles as the knife pressed deep.

Yennefer made herself concentrate on her own work, monitoring the bubble and froth of a complex elixir.

Abortifacients were old hat for her, a much in-demand remedy in a social climate such as theirs. At least once a fortnight, a young woman stumbled to her, frazzled and fearful over her prospects, dreading the wrath of her father, her husband, her liege lord. Yennefer always took the time to cup their hands in hers as she spoke the incantation and touch the round of their shoulders as the elixir passed their lips.

It was a cruel trick of Destiny to flaunt a revolving reminder of her own dry, barren womb in the fertile bodies of women who desperately wished the ability away.

Not so cruel a trick as the strange circumstances she found herself in now. Her magical working had inspired an impossible thing, just as unnatural and unfeasible as a pregnancy of her own, and yet, here she worked, piecing together a way to unravel it.

Yennefer felt no satisfaction in the apparent success of the spell, knowing she would be unlikely to replicate whatever activator the bard had accidentally stumbled into. Too many variables. Besides, the ingredients were vanishingly rare, the timetables far too lengthy, the planetary misalignment even more exaggerated than at the drafting of the original working, and in great honesty, Yennefer was feeling uncharacteristically discouraged.

Within this very house, the proof of her possible success rested quietly in the constructed womb of a highly irritating human man who didn’t have the faintest clue what such a thing meant to her. Her brief internal examinations earlier had found the magically-inspired uterus to be ordinary and perfectly formed. The life held inside it appeared equally ordinary, presenting as a fetus far more advanced than its conception hours ago should allow.

She had not dared look for too long. Did not wish to know the cadence of the heartbeat, the flex of the developing muscles.

An impossible babe, cocooned for now in the warm protection of blood and fluid and viscera. _Her_ babe. But no, not hers in any way that mattered. Not hers the way she still ached for. Never hers. That possibility long vanished from her.

Her laboratory felt more drafty than usual this evening, her fingers aching with the cold as she measured out a gritty powder and introduced it to the bubbling elixir. She watched fresh drips of wax hurry down the ridges of the leaning candle that heated the glass beaker and fought to keep herself from shivering.

Geralt’s knee bumped against hers.

He had finished the mandrake root and set it neatly aside and looked at her now with a familiar constipated look as though he was about to say something stupidly profound or profoundly stupid. She hated this man. She loved him.

"Did you always want to be a mother?"

"No," said Yennefer. Profound _and_ stupid, then. “What do you know of how sorceresses are prepared for court service?”

“Enchantments,” said Geralt.

"All enchantments have a cost. The one that made me suitable to play as royal court jester made sure that I could have nothing else but that life. No family. No legacy. I was made to choose.”

“You regret that choice,” he said, intelligent enough not to shape it into a question.

“It was hardly a choice. What can a child know of what she will want? I expect you of all creatures can relate."

"Witchers don't get a choice.” Geralt smoothed his hand across the rough stubble of his jaw. A nervous gesture. “We’re made or we die. They don't even have to kill us. The Trials do that. Don't stick on anyone weak-willed."

"Convenient," said Yennefer.

“What do you know of how Witchers are brought into training?” he asked.

“Common gossip says that children are snatched in the night.”

“Yes.”

Geralt’s eyes gleamed a startling amber in the candlelight. He held far more still than an ordinary man could manage, no shift or twitch of his muscles wasted.

“But more accurately, they’re bartered like cattle,” said Yennefer.

“The Law of Surprise.” Geralt’s voice held no shortage of bitterness.

“An ancient agreement bound by the whims of Fate herself,” hummed Yennefer. “A pretty sounding lie.”

“You don’t believe in it?”

“I believe that those in power will say whatever is expedient to their goals. The parents don’t bleat so terribly when the time comes if refusing to relinquish their offspring means defying the laws of the Universe. It’s very clever. Neat and tidy.”

“My Child of Surprise,” said Geralt, gruff words forced from his mouth as though they physically pained him. “I can't subject it to this life. I will not claim him.”

She looked at him. Fought to smooth away any of the tumultuous emotions his declaration brought to the surface. Yes, a cruel, cruel trick of Destiny.

Yennefer, struggling for decades with all that she had toward a taste of what she was missing, while those around her stumbled across it by accident and proceeded to reject it. She ached with the unfairness of it. It stung in the cold hollow of her belly.

“Then, you’re a fool and a coward,” she said and turned away to resume her work. In her periphery, she could see his brow furrowed, his hands pressed against the surface of her workstation.

“But you said--”

“It doesn’t matter what I believe. Destiny comes for us all the same,” she huffed. “This is proof enough, isn’t it? That I am sitting here endeavoring to put an end to a child that shouldn’t exist, discussing another that you wish didn’t. No random trick of entropy could be so unkind.”

“You want it that much,” said Geralt with surprising softness. Once more, not a question. Yennefer did not look at him, frustrated to find herself blinking back the burn of tears. “A child?”

“I want what was taken from me. I want everything that I have been denied.”

Her fingers curled around the edge of the table, hating that she wished he would cover her hand with his.

“Yen.”

She hated even more how the abbreviation of her name sent a pathetic flutter through her belly. She looked at her Witcher, had the thought that she would like to smooth the wrinkle of his brow, kiss the tensed hinge of his jaw. She loved him in quiet ways that she had not thought herself capable of, long snuffed from her.

She hated him for that as well, the ease with which he brought her old hurts to the surface without trying, without realizing. He didn’t know how she loved him, and she would not deign to tell him, would not give him that power over her.

They said that Witchers did not feel, but when she had breached his mind in Rinde, she had met a dizzying fog of anxieties and desires. Strange and muted, yes, not small and fleeting like an ordinary man’s but overwhelming in their simple vastness, his emotions steady behemoths that Yennefer could see neither head nor tail of. She could not fully read her Witcher and no longer tried.

It frightened her. The depths of what she might glimpse.

She did not want to know how he loved her.

The elixir in the warmed beaker turned suddenly blue and fizzy, overflowing to the workbench and hissing furiously.

"Shit," Yennefer swore and waved a quick hand to vanish the liquid. “This isn’t fucking working. I’ll need to do more examinations.”

“In the morning,” said Geralt. “They’re sleeping.”

Surprised, Yennefer looked to the narrow window of the tower laboratory to find it black with night.

She swore once more, pushed herself back from her workbench.

“Good night, Geralt.”

Yennefer did not bid him follow her to her chambers as she lifted her skirts to slip down the staircase, trusting him to extinguish the candles and find his way to his own room.

She cursed the aching part of her that wished he would follow after her anyway.

* * *

Jaskier intended to sulk as dramatically and as miserably as he could manage for as long as his condition was not treated with the sympathy that it rightfully deserved. And truth be told, he had an exquisite talent for sulking most miserably and most laboriously for durations of time untenable to less extraordinary men.

Sulking so strenuously had its costs, of course.

His stomach grumbled.

He had not eaten at all the day before, both because his nausea had threatened him any time he thought of food and because he was too stubborn to request anything that may be palatable.

In his state, he should be waited on hand and foot. He should be fed rare morsels from the fingers of scantily-clothed attendants. He should have one maid to rub the tension from his shoulders and another to coo softly in his ear over the unfairness of his plight and perhaps another to offer him any pleasurable distractions that she wished to.

The young serving girl, Amelia, who Yennefer had left to mind him was attentive in a perfunctory way, stoking the fire and emptying the chamberpot and keeping the water glass at his bedside table filled as though he were a household dog. She did not meet his eyes and answered his increasingly elaborate requests with a purse of her lips and small shakes of her head.

The witch should be minding him herself, given that it was her fault that he was in this mess. Had she not ensorcelled Geralt in the first place, none of this would have happened.

It was during a rant about the pitiful state of his unfluffed pillows that the door swung open and admitted said witch. Amelia curtsied and hurried to take her leave.

“Are you quite done harassing that girl? I’ll have to pay her triple for being kind enough to tolerate you for my sake.”

“Kind?” scoffed Jaskier. “There’s hardly anything kind about how I’ve been treated here. I’ve been afflicted by a terrible curse and offered only lukewarm water to drink and not a single apology.”

“How are you feeling?” Yennefer asked with the air of someone resisting gritting their teeth around the words.

“Dreadful. Abysmal. Utterly neglected and mistreated.”

“Physically, I mean,” she deadpanned.

“Oh, much the same,” he said with a wave of his hand. Though truthfully, his stomach had settled nicely through the night, and he no longer felt as overcome with fatigue.

“I’ll need to examine you again,” said Yennefer. “I’m not having much success.”

“Have you considered that you’re simply incompete-- oi! Ah!” Jaskier squeaked as she strode across the room and pulled back the blankets he was burrowed in without a single by your leave. “See? Horrendously mistreated. Warn a fellow before you-- ouch! Yennefer!”

“I’m barely touching you,” she said, holding her fingers against his throat to take his pulse.

“I’d prefer it if you didn’t touch me at all.”

“Tough shit.”

“Ack! I won’t tolerate these abuses much longer. I’ll surely waste away.”

“If only.”

She continued to loom over him as she sat at the edge of his bed, prodding and poking, muttering under her breath. Jaskier had rarely been so close to her, not in the years since he and Geralt first made her unfortunate acquaintance. He could smell her strange and cloying perfume, a scent that was both familiar and sharply foreign.

“Off,” she said, tugging at the sleeve of his soft sleep tunic. He rarely wore a lick of clothing to bed but had obediently worn the clothes Amelia laid out for him the evening before. The fabric was surprisingly luxurious, though plain-colored.

Grumbling as he did so, he tugged the loose shirt over his head and sat up stiffly, making sure to shiver pitifully against the chill of the air.

“Would it kill you to pick a less drafty evil lair?” he grumbled and flinched even before Yennefer’s cold fingers splayed over the goose-pimpled skin of his abdomen.

“You’re showing,” she said, voice flat.

“ _What?_ ” he squeaked, his own hands leaping to touch-- oh Melitele’s sweet tits-- the undeniable bloating of his abdomen. He certainly could not claim to have the svelte figure of his nubile youth any longer, but yesterday, he had had only the ripple of a healthy paunch at his waistline.

Jaskier almost didn’t dare to look down and see the proof of his condition with his own eyes, but swallowed hard and drew on all his courage to do so. Beneath their hands, the rounding of his belly was slight but obvious. The sight of it made him feel a bit faint.

“Ah,” he breathed. “Really not a prank, then.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” said Yennefer as she removed her hands. “Seems to be a cosmic joke at my expense.”

“ _Your_ expense? You’re not the one who-- oh gods.” He pressed the back of his hand to his forehead and let out a shaky exhale. “I’m feeling ill again. I’m feeling quite faint.”

“Do you think that this is what I would like to be doing with my precious time? Waiting on an imbecile and solving his fuckups? It’s not exactly pleasurable.”

“I’m the one whose body is-- who has to endure something it was most definitely not meant to endure. I’m really very certain that I have the short end of the stick here. I’m not sure that this has much to do with _your_ suffering at all, Yennefer. This… this _thing_ inside me is--”

“It has everything to do with me,” snapped Yennefer. “The child is mine. Was meant to be mine. Mine… and Geralt’s.”

Jaskier became very aware that his hands still cupped around the swell of his lower belly.

“Does Geralt know that?”

“No. This working required genetic material from both a mother and a father, and he was convenient.”

“Would you have told him? Asked him?”

To her credit, Yennefer looked almost regretful for a moment, her mouth twisting in a grimace.

“It doesn’t matter. I’d long abandoned it as a lost cause. Besides, it seems that he already has a child that he has no need for.”

“He talked with you about his Child Surprise?” asked Jaskier with a beat of shock. If there was one topic of conversation his dear friend avoided beyond all others, it was what had occurred years ago in Cintra. He hadn’t expected Geralt to heed his advice and tell her.

Yennefer groaned. “Of course you knew about it.”

“I was there when it happened,” said Jaskier. “Bit of a cock-up, that one. Pretty certain I’ve been permanently barred from the kingdom, but I haven’t been back to check.”

“Neither has Geralt.”

“Of course not. He’s guilt-ridden enough as it is. Convinced he’d fuck it up. Ruin that child’s life.”

“He can’t avoid it forever. That’s not how any of this works. Being a Child of Surprise himself, he should know that very well.

“He wasn’t,” said Jaskier, feeling a touch of guilt to reveal the truth. It had taken many years to earn Geralt’s confidence in the more intimate details of his past. “His mother abandoned him. Dropped him off with the Witchers of her own free will.”

Yennefer said nothing.

Dust motes whispered in the morning sunlight that stretched across the room. Once more, Jaskier found himself wishing to be sprawled in a sun-soaked field wine-drunk and lost in revelry.

“Choosing to abandon another child will not right that wrong,” she said finally.

Jaskier couldn’t say whether she meant the one in Cintra or the one whose very existence he was still grappling with. He felt out the unfamiliar swell of his belly with the slow sweep of a palm.

“You keep going on about choice,” he said. “I don’t think it’s quite as simple as you’d like it to be.”

“Don’t lecture your elders, bard.”

“Elderly, more like.”

He was startled to find himself knocked across the head and shoulders with a feathery pillow.

Gripping the edges of said pillow, Yennefer appeared equally startled to be caught engaging in such childish behavior, but that did not stop her from delivering a few more swift blows.

“Ow! Yennefer! Have you _forgotten_ that I’m carrying your child?”

“As if I would forget something like that!” She huffed and offered one last smack against his raised arms. “Besides, I’ll have that sorted before the day’s end I’m sure. Then, you can be rid of me and go on your way.”

“Right,” he said. “Get to it then. In the meantime, I’ll remain here lost in the agonizing throes of neglect and suffering.”

“Have fun with that.” Yennefer rolled her eyes and was gone.

* * *

It was nearing evening, the distant mountains visible through the tower’s narrow window streaked in russet light, when Yennefer leapt from her stool at her workbench and swore loudly.

“Fuck, Geralt, I may just have it,” she said, quick to cap the steaming bottle in her hands and mutter a word of protection over it. “It has to be done before midnight or I’ll have to re-configure the planetary correspondence but it should be-- yes, it should work. Come along.”

Geralt hastened to follow her.  
He was unused to such lengthy periods of inactivity, especially in Yennefer’s presence, and had spent the day trying and failing to make himself useful as the mage dove into more esoteric magicks of which he had little practical knowledge. Their usual interactions were much more athletic and short-lived.

After running out of herbs to sort and books to squint over that made increasingly less sense, he had taken to lying on a bench beside Yennefer’s workstation, hands folded across his belly, staring in quiet contemplation at the ceiling.

This was the reason he hated inactivity. Too much thinking. Too much time to consider the life of the child in Cintra and the steady thrum of Destiny moving them ever forward. Too much time to imagine what the sort of life suited to a child would look like. A little house on the coast somewhere he had built with his own hands. Yennefer in the garden and he in the stables and Jaskier crooning in the crook of a tree.

A fanciful daydream. Impossible.

To distract himself, he had listened for the heartbeat of the impossibility they aimed to correct. It was a swift stutter of a thing, beating a dozen times or more for each of his own steady thumps.

From time to time, one of Yennefer’s small hands had dropped to slip through his white hair, and something in the absent touch had left his throat dry and tight.

Yennefer’s black dress swished along the stone stairs as she swirled down them ahead of him, hurrying down a labyrinth of maid’s passageways that criss-crossed the entirety of the house. If he were not following Yennefer, navigation in the dark and winding hallways would prove nearly impossible even with his improved night vision, and that set Geralt’s teeth on edge.

In a blink, they emerged from the dark into a room flickering with firelight.

Jaskier, who sat up in the four-poster bed strumming aimless chords on his lute, squawked in alarm at their sudden entrance.

“Must you do that every time?”

“Yes,” said Yennefer coldly. The bard scoffed.

Not for the first time, Geralt wondered just how likely it was for the three of them to survive this situation with minimal eye-clawing or threats of castration. He had held out some hope that the animosity would quiet in time, but it seemed only to stoke higher. Reaching a breaking point was inevitable.

It pained him to know that he could only ever have one at the expense of the other, never Jaskier and Yennefer together in the same frame. His life halved into separate paths, the ones he travelled with the bard and the ones he took refuge from with the mage.

“Have you come to tell me you’ve finally solved this? I’d thought I would have to send for a more talented mage.”

“Hmm, pity, I don’t know that I’m here to tell you anything now.”

Geralt sighed.

“She’s solved it,” he said.

He expected the bard to brighten or immediately jump to celebration, but instead, his mouth tightened. This must be draining him more than his exaggerated complaints let on. He did look weary, poorly-fitted sleep clothes slipping off his shoulders and bruises sitting below his eyes. It was a discomfiting look for him.

Geralt had seen his companion fall seriously ill only one other time, the very same day the two of them had encountered Yennefer. He liked it no better now than he did then, his own helplessness itching under his skin.

“Oh,” said Jaskier. “So that’s--” He gestured at the slender bottle cupped in Yennefer’s hands. “--what, I just drink that, then? Seems simple.”

“It’s not,” she said, “but all you have to do is drink it and lie back to let me work, yes. We do have some time yet to prepare. It has to be done at precise hours or risk failure.”

“Right then,” said Jaskier, running a hand through his atrocious bedhead and succeeding only in mussing it further. “Could those preparations include dinner by any chance? The baby’s fucking starving.”

Yennefer blinked.

Though Geralt had been told not to, he could not help but tip his head to listen for the staccato beat of the swifter heart rate that fluttered alongside the bard’s. It beat far stronger now and had slowed to an even thump.

“The... baby?”

“Listen, Yennefer, I know that you’re advanced in age, but don’t tell me you’ve forgotten the reason we’re doing all of this in the first place.”

Geralt swore under his breath, praying to any deity that would listen that Yennefer not decide this all wasn’t worth her time actually and reduce Jaskier to a charred spot on the plush mattress.

“Fine, fine,” said Yennefer. Geralt exhaled. “I’ll have something brought up for you, Your Majesty.”

“Thank the gods,” said Jaskier smugly. “Finally some respect around here.”

“I was speaking to the baby.”

Amelia brought up a platter of aged cheeses, grapes, and dried cuts of meat, along with a bottle of dark red wine. Yennefer even went so far as to pour out a goblet for Jaskier, their eyes locked as she did so.

“Are you satisfied now? Can we get started?”

Jaskier pointedly set aside his goblet of wine.

“What would you say,” he began, steepling his fingers, “if I said I had changed my mind?” He settled a hand low on his belly. Geralt’s eyes fell to the accentuated curve beneath his palm.

"Of course he’s changed his mind," Yennefer huffed, throwing up her hands.

"Ah, ah, no, I asked what you would say if I had."

"I'd say you were a fool, bard. And a nuisance. And a waste of my time."

"I thought it was my choice."

Yennefer paused to take a long swig from the bottle of wine, fingers tight around the neck.

"Do you have any idea what this entails?"

"Eh, I thought you had that--" He wiggled his fingers, "--magically handled."

"Not childbirth, you idiot. Child _rearing_."

"Nevermind that.”

“ _Why?_ What do you want?”

“Just yesterday you told me you’d make a horrible father,” said Geralt, a feeble attempt at gaining control of the situation.

“Yes, well, just yesterday you told me that Yennefer would raise it.”

“Did he now?” said Yennefer, furious violet gaze turning his way.

“Um,” said Geralt. Luckily, she swiftly redirected.

“What’s changed? It’s been less than twelve hours since we last spoke.”

“This is all happening a bit faster than it ordinarily does, yeah? I of all people am the most intimately aware of that.”

“What does that have to do with anything? I told you the timeline would be accelerated.”

“I can _feel_ it, Yennefer. Did you know that I can feel it? The child’s movements?”

“Even a dim-witted urchin knows that about pregnancy.”

“Yes, yes, but I didn’t know it would feel so-- I didn’t know what it would mean.”

“You’ve chosen a poor time to get sentimental. I worked very, very hard on this elixir. Which you requested, I might add.”

“I’m a naturally sentimental man! And I have an extra supply of hormones at the moment. It can’t be helped.”

“Just drink the elixir, Jaskier, before I truly lose my patience. As you said, it’s all hormones. If we don’t do this now, we’ll lose the window! The elixir will have to be remade with new alignments in mind, and at the rate you’re progressing--”

“You’re all talk, witch,” said Jaskier grimly. “How much simpler your life must be, to never have changed your mind about anything you’ve ever done.”

Yennefer stilled.

With a settling exhale, she set the uncorked bottle of wine and shimmering elixir beside one another on a bedside table.

“Fine,” she said. With her back turned, Geralt noted the slight hitch of one shoulder below the other, a rarely visible flaw in her silhouette. “What is that you want, Jaskier? I will listen.”

In growing alarm, Geralt watched Jaskier’s eyes take on the gleam of foolish triumph that always spelled a world of trouble for the both of them.

“It’s my body, yes, but it’s not my child. I simply think all parties involved should be fully informed and consenting.”

“Don’t you dare,” hissed Yennefer, reeling on him.

“Geralt,” said Jaskier, peering up at him through lowered lashes. “Yennefer has something to tell you.”

“ _Jaskier_.” Yennefer sounded truly dangerous. Things were rapidly spiraling out of control.

“Well, are you going to tell me?” Geralt had no fucking clue what was going on. “Because she really might kill you, you know.”

“Eh, I don’t think she’d harm her own unborn child. It is hers, after all.”

“I just spent days crafting an abortifacient, you imbecile!”

“And you’re telling me you wouldn’t have regretted that?”

“That hardly matters,” said Yennefer. “Regrets are a fact of life. I will have another opportunity. I will make sure that I do”

“And what if you don’t? What if this is your only chance, and you let it slip past you?”

Yennefer held her body as straight as she could, a stubborn gleam of hurt in her violet eyes that even Jaskier must see.

“Then my life will at least be consistent in its cruelty,” she said. Her voice did not break, but Geralt knew her well enough to sense her unsteadiness.

“It’s yours, Yen?” Geralt asked in the heavy silence. He had suspected such a thing but not known for certain. Yennefer had been dismissively mute on the parentage.

“Yes,” she said. “As well as yours.”

The heaviness in the room condensed around him. Jaskier no longer looked smug, his hand slipped low against the round of his stomach. The heartbeat within seemed to thunder so loudly that Geralt was certain the others could hear it just as clearly as he could.

“What?” he breathed.

“The working required genetic material,” said Yennefer. “I happened to have yours on hand. But I didn’t intend for this to happen, Geralt. I would have-- well, I would have done this very differently.”

Geralt could not say whether she was telling the truth. He had the feeling that had Jaskier not fumbled into her working that she would not have freely told him of her desire to have a child. She had hardly told him anything of herself in the years since they met, while Geralt could not seem to stop revealing every bit and piece of himself to her. Each short-lived meeting, she knew him more, and he felt he knew her less.

But this time was different.

Geralt could see past the stubborn stiffness of her body to the cracks in her armor. He ached to have the courage to reach for her, hold her in his arms, but knew if she rebuked him, some part of him would fracture. He stood as stiffly as she did. He did not dare reach for her.

“How would you have done it?” he asked.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said with a sigh. “Don’t overthink this, Witcher. It’s only genetic material. No sentiment attached.”

“Oh come on. No sentiment?” Jaskier rolled his eyes. “You two have been flirting around each other for years. I know there’s sentiment.”

“Shut up, you idiot,” Yennefer snapped.

“That’s no way to speak to the father of your child.”

“I don’t know that _father_ is the right descriptor in this situation.”

“Do I look like a mother to you, Yennefer?”

Her eyes slid down his body.

“At the moment? Yes.”

The two of them stared at one another in hostile silence.

Geralt had never seen two people more contrasted to one another, Yennefer standing in her elegant gown and rolling curls, Jaskier sitting cross-legged in oversized sleep clothes. He had never known two people more equal in their stubbornness.

“Geralt,” said Jaskier finally, voice softening, “come here.”

He shuffled toward the bed without thought, having been rooted in the center of the room through the conversation. His legs felt clumsy and wooden. Jaskier gestured for Geralt’s hand, and he gave it, shocked as he always was by how warm the human’s skin felt against his. His own sluggish heart rate left his extremities chilled.

Warmer still was the round of his companion’s stomach as Geralt’s hand was drawn to press against it.

Beneath his loose fingers, a flutter of movement.

“There,” said Jaskier, and Geralt could not meet his gaze, could do nothing but stare mutely where his palm lay. The heartbeat was a physical thing now, thumping swiftly beneath his hand, accompanied by the press and kick of small limbs. Impossibly small against his too-large hands. An impossible babe. “Tell me that that’s not deserving of sentiment.”

Yennefer coughed.

“Don’t overstimulate him, bard,” she said. “This is why I wasn’t going to tell him.”

“Oh, don’t be jealous,” said Jaskier. Bafflingly, he held out his other hand. “Come feel it, Yennefer. You’re allowed. It’s your child as well, after all.”

“I’d really rather not.”

“Suit yourself.” His fingers held tight around Geralt’s wrist.

“The window’s closing,” Yennefer warned. “Am I to dump this elixir down the drain? Last chance, bard. Be sure of your choice.”

“Geralt,” Jaskier asked with a careful softness, “is this what you want?”

He knew he could not put it to words, the hope and fear that rose together in his chest as the unborn child kicked against his palm. He returned to his daydreams of the house on the coast. A dark-haired child at the edge of the water. Jaskier’s arms sweeping her up, Yennefer tucking a flower into her hair.

An impossibility. A useless dream.

Geralt ached.

“It’s what he wants,” said Yennefer in quiet resignation. “He’s wanting it very loudly.”

“That’s settled, then,” said Jaskier and released Geralt’s wrist to shift back against the mattress. Reluctantly, Geralt allowed his hand to fall, the touch more awkward than ever without Jaskier’s hand to cradle his. “I’ll be your surrogate. When the child’s here, it’s yours.”

“I need a fucking drink,” Yennefer groaned, sweeping up the open bottle of wine from the bedside table.

“Mmm, don’t I ever,” said Jaskier, gesturing, but Yennefer held it well away from him.

“Have you gone mad, bard? Even simple peasant women know that alcohol can harm an unborn child.”

“Hearsay,” he scoffed. “I’ll have you know my mother drank quite heavily while pregnant with me, and I turned out just fine.”

“Clearly.” Yennefer downed a long swig from the upturned bottle. “There will be _no_ alcohol. And I will have to monitor your nutrient intake very closely. I won’t have any child of mine turning out to be some… homeless jester like yourself.”

Jaskier squawked in offense.

“Your child should be so lucky to inherit even an ounce of my musical talent and endless charm.”

“Endless something, I’d say.”

“Be nice, witch. I’m doing something nice for you here. I’m being incredibly nice.”

“No one asked you to. Being _nice_ gets one nothing but inconvenience.”

“If I wasn’t so nice, I would say you owed me one after this. But I’m doing it out of the goodness of my heart.”

“How gracious of you. Am I meant to give you a reward for your monumental efforts?”

“Some wine would be nice.”

“No alcohol, you imbecile. I could strangle you.”

“But you won’t. Not while I’m carrying your--”

“All bets are off the moment the child’s born.”

“I wouldn’t expect anything less.”

Geralt, feeling numb and unsettled and more than overwhelmed, allowed the rising cadence of their bickering to wash over him, still not wholly convinced that the three of them ( _now four_ , he thought with a rising lurch of panic) would make it out of this intact.

* * *

The very next afternoon, poor, shy Amelia stepped into Yennefer’s study, her untied apron gripped nervously in her hands, and apologized profusely that she must take her leave at once for her sister’s husband’s great aunt had fallen ill with dropsy and she would rather wipe the crust from her oozing sores than tend to Yennefer’s bard a day longer.

Yennefer snapped closed her book in a puff of dust, straightening from her sprawl on the velvet chaise. Geralt sneezed.

Sighing with untenable weariness, Yennefer strode to a lockbox on her ornate desk and removed a bulging coinpurse. The girl blushed scarlet when Yennefer pressed it into her hands.

“Dear Amelia, please take a holiday. Anywhere you’d like to go. Imagine it very carefully, and the door off the parlor will take you there.”

The girl nodded, curtsied, and was off.

Truthfully, the moment that she had acquired it, the manor house in Vengerberg had been enchanted to take care of its own needs and most of the needs of its residents without any hired help, but Yennefer had been loathe to dismiss young Amelia and put her out of work. Until very recently, the girl had had the most comfortable employment of any maid on the Continent.

“Let me guess,” said Geralt from his velvet armchair, looking bizarrely domestic with an ancient tome propped up in his lap, his hair loose around his shoulders, “her sister’s husband’s great aunt doesn’t have dropsy.”

“ _Someone_ will wish they had dropsy. If I find he’s frisked my maid, I fear I cannot guarantee the safety of his genitalia.”

“He gets bored.”

“So? Now he will be getting castrated.”

“Good luck with that, Yen,” said Geralt, idly flipping pages in the dusty book.

The two of them had never done this before, sit beside one another in comfortable silence for hours. Yennefer had retired to her study to freshen up on the mechanics of spells associated with childbirth, but the Witcher seemed to be reading purely for pleasure. If one found an encyclopedia of historical idioms pleasurable.

Yennefer straightened her bodice rather than face her warm rush of fondness for him.

“Are you coming or not?”

“Sounds like you’ve got it handled,” said Geralt without looking up from the book.

“Coward.”

“Good luck,” he repeated.

She didn’t _need_ luck. Yennefer was no cowering serving girl and would not give so easily to the whims of a simpering imbecile.

The bard’s room was dark, the curtains pulled along the tall windows and the fire dwindled to glowing cinders. Yennefer strode across the room and tore open the curtains, late afternoon sunlight touching the man that lay in abject misery in the bed.

He could not be feeling any real discomfort. Yennefer had been most gracious in designing a working with the built-in feature of softening most of the usual aches and pains of gestation.

The idiot was simply being melodramatic.

Jaskier groaned theatrically.

“I expect you to have a good explanation for driving my poor maid to quit on me.”

That perked him up, his brow creasing. Yennefer watched in amusement as it took a good bit of effort to shove himself up from his backwards sprawl, the unfamiliar, heavy roundness of his stomach leaving him struggling like a turtle on its back.

She thought how strange it must be, the speed of the progression and the very reality of a body not meant for such an endeavor giving a rousing go of it. He would be full-term before the week’s end. She had thought she would feel more envy over his condition than she did, able to experience something that was no longer a biological reality for her, but there was a reason she had designed the working with a vastly shortened timeframe.

She knew intimately what it was to feel like her own body betrayed her daily. Even now, the ache in her spine and jaw returned most mornings. At times, her lungs forgot that they were no longer compressed by the hunch and twist of her ribcage, that she could draw full, clean breaths of air with little effort. Often, she did not recognize herself in the mirror.

“Amelia’s gone?” asked the bard as he finally righted himself, blessedly interrupting her musings. “No wonder my peppermint tea’s taken so long. Which I really will have to insist on. My digestion goes all wonky without it.”

Yennefer could gladly live out the rest of her many long days without hearing a single mention of Jaskier’s bowel function.

“Do you take joy in irritating everyone around you?”

“Hmm,” hummed Jaskier, as though thinking on it. “That depends. Will you be more likely to procure me some peppermint tea if I irritate you? Or less?”

Yennefer sighed and flicked her fingers, summoning a steaming mug of tea directly into the bard’s hands. He yelped, barely avoiding slopping tea across his abdomen.

“Happy?”

He sipped delicately at the rim of the mug, wincing over the heat.

“This doesn’t taste very lovingly prepared.”

“Good,” said Yennefer. “I hope you choke on it.”

“That’s not a very pleasant thing to say to the--”

“Oh fuck off, haven’t you gotten tired of that rote line yet?”

“ _Rote_? Nothing I ever say is any such thing. You take that back.”

“Repetitive drivel. Every word.”

“Agh, how much longer can this ordeal possibly take? I’ll waste away to nothing in these conditions. My spirit will simply wither.”

“It’s been three days,” said Yennefer.

“Three days of miserable treatment and undeserved criticism. How is an artist to endure in this climate?”

“Your whining and inane demands drove a lovely girl to flee from your service at speed. Which I’m sure must be commonplace for you. But it won’t be tolerated in my household.”

“This isn’t even your household. You stole it from the Duke.”

“Nevermind that. Your condition does not give you leave to be an ass.”

“And why not? _Your_ condition’s certainly never stopped you.”

“You--” Yennefer caught herself with a steadying breath before she could stoop to his level and spell his tea scalding hot. “You are an incredibly vapid, irritating little man, and the only reason I continue to tolerate your idiocy is that Geralt is bizarrely fond of you.”

“ _And_ I’m carrying your--”

“Yes, yes.” She waved a hand. “Though why you volunteered to do such a thing just to complain at every opportunity, I haven't the faintest clue.”

“You know why,” said Jaskier, tone strangely sincere. “The same reason you continue to tolerate me.”

“You love him,” said Yennefer. “Geralt.”

“So do you.”

They stared at one another, Yennefer leaning with hip cocked against his bedpost and Jaskier tracing idle patterns across his round lower belly. He did not look less exhausted than the night before, blue veins showing through the pale skin of his jaw.

She thought of Geralt in her study, relaxed as he ever could be. She thought of what she had glimpsed inside his head as he felt the unborn child shift under his hand. The rolling thunder of the waves. The little house. The quiet sounds of the stable. How at ease he had been. How happy.

An idyllic daydream.

And a foolish one. Yennefer could not give him that quiet life by the sea. She was not made for quiet. Neither was Geralt, truly.

Even with what she had wanted so close at hand, she could not picture herself in it. Motherhood. In all her desperate searching throughout the Continent, she had not thought so far ahead. To what sort of mother she would be. To how it would feel to hold her own child in her arms.

In truth, the reality petrified her.

What did she know of motherhood? What use could she be to a child?

What if this did little to ease her restless desires? What if she could feel nothing at all for this babe, more carved from her along with her womb than simple anatomy?

What if what she truly wanted slipped into a ceaseless fog of uncertainty, never achievable only because it refused to solidify into anything identifiable, changing shape the moment it was in sight?

What if this child felt nothing at all for her?

“Are you feeling any discomfort?” she asked the man in bed, purely to distance herself from the swirling chaos of her thoughts.

“Plenty,” Jaskier grumbled. “Your child seems to have it in her head that she can batter her way free if she tries long and hard enough.”

“She?”

“You’re not hoping it’s a girl? Figured you’d rather have a daughter.”

“I hadn’t given it much thought,” said Yennefer honestly.

Before now, the unborn child had existed nebulously as the generic concept of an infant. She hadn’t thought about things like sex or hair color or personality.

She had the sudden realization that she didn’t even know what Geralt had looked like before his mutations. His hair or eye color. Or, come to think of it, whether in this strange case said mutations were genetic.

“What about names?” asked Jaskier. “Do you have any in mind? Because my dear family has a dreadfully long list of names prepared for any of my lawfully-sired children. Though they almost definitely don’t have protocols in place for something like this.”

“You mean they don’t have bylaws for getting knocked up by a Witcher?”

“Not likely,” said the bard. “What do you think about Alfred?”

“I thought you said it was a girl.”

“Educated guess. Wishful thinking. I think Geralt would prefer a daughter, same as you.”

Yennefer allowed herself to imagine it. A little girl, pink and chubby, her hands fisted in Geralt’s length of silver hair. His lips against the flyaway wisps at the crown of her head. The gruff whisper of his damaged voice given to the cadence of a lullaby.

It was no difficulty to imagine such a thing.

“I don’t know what either of us would prefer. There hasn’t been time to talk about it,” she said, hoping the melancholy did not seep into her tone. By the pitying smile on the bard’s face, she knew it had.

“Then talk about it,” he said. “But bring me something to eat first. I’m famished. I might starve to nothing.”

Yennefer sighed and waved a hand, an overflowing platter of rations from the pantry appearing at Jaskier’s bedside.

“I expect you to eat every one of your vegetables or I’ll be forced to have Geralt spoonfeed you like the infant you are.”

“For what it’s worth, Yennefer,” said Jaskier through a mouthful of bread, “I think you’ll make a good mother.”

Yennefer tried and failed to ignore the pleasant warmth that the sentiment inspired.

* * *

Yennefer returned to the study looking strangely morose, lost in thought. Geralt knew that look, had likely worn it himself many times. For all that Jaskier made a show of buffoonery, he could be alarmingly insightful, cutting to the meat of an issue with ease.

He waited for Yennefer to settle back into the chaise she had lounged in all morning, but to his surprise, she kicked off her boots, gestured for him to set his dusty book aside, and clambered up to curl into his lap, her head resting against his chest. He did not resist pressing his nose into her sweet-smelling hair, his arms encircling her.

“What do you want from life, Geralt?” she asked him. “In Rinde. What did you wish for? Clearly nothing that’s improved much of anything for you.”

They were doing this now? After all these years? Jaskier must have truly gotten under her skin.

“I wished that you’d live,” he said, settling on honesty as the best way forward. A few days ago he may not have offered the truth so freely. A few days ago, their lives and futures had looked very different indeed. “That’s done plenty to improve my life.”

Yennefer shifted in apparent discomfort, unable to fully hide her pleased reaction to his words. He was as poorly-practiced with affection as she was, but he wanted to try. He wanted to please her.

“What a waste,” she mumbled against his chest. “You could have had anything at all.”

“I could have given my wish to you. If you wanted a child, you could have had it then.”

“Wishes aren’t so simple.” She grimaced. “That’s why we keep orbiting each other. Why I feel like this. We’re bound together. Chained.”

Her words did not carry the weight that they seemed to imply. He knew that she didn’t believe them.

“That’s not why.”

“No? Do you have some other explanation?”

“Not how djinn magic works,” said Geralt. “You lived. That’s my wish fulfilled.”

“So, you hold my life in your hands. I live because a man willed it. I live indebted to you.”

“You would have preferred to die?”

“Maybe,” she snapped. “That’s no business of yours.” Geralt tightened the grip of his arms as much as he dared, which was very little, wishing himself brave enough to take her wrists in his, touch the scars there with his mouth.

 _My life is better with you in it,_ he thought with the hope of being overheard.

He knew by the way her own arms slipped around his waist and held still that she was listening.

“You’ve condemned yourself to me,” she said, and the quiet words ached in Geralt’s belly. “It won’t happen the way it does in your head. None of us are made for a life like that.”

“I know.”

Didn’t stop the images from appearing again anytime he closed his eyes. The coast. The sky. Jaskier’s laugh lines, Yennefer’s smile. Roach would be in season soon. He could put her to a stout pony stallion and breed a foal who would come of riding age along with the child. He knew nothing of carpentry but would learn enough to build a stable as well as a house.

“If you wanted a life like that, why didn’t you wish for it when you had the chance?”

“I didn’t know. I didn’t think I wanted anything. Didn’t know how to.”

In every daydream, he watched and worked from a distance. He built a life of comfort around the people he cared for and hesitated to step into it. He couldn’t dream of himself beside them, holding his child’s hands.

“What changed?” Yennefer asked, her voice as quiet and small as he had ever heard it.

“You lived,” he said into her hair.

That day in Rinde could have gone very differently. He may have wished his closest friend into permanent silence. He may have watched Yennefer tear herself apart.

But they had lived. Both of them. Despite everything, Jaskier and Yennefer remained in his life.

All he wanted now was what they wanted. Anything. Everything.

“I don’t know if I want to be a mother,” said Yennefer more quietly still.

“Do you think you’d make a bad one?” he asked, and she laughed.

“I never thought about it. Not really. But given my parental influences, I assume I’ll do as wretchedly as they did.”

“Or better than they did.”

“Perhaps,” she said. “I know you don’t quite believe that’s possible. Not for people like us.”

“Yeah,” Geralt admitted.

“But you want to try.”

“Yeah.”

“Then I want that too.”

They breathed together in the stuffy air of Yennefer’s study, allowing their fears to rise up and entangle.

* * *

“You drove off the help, so don’t be surprised if none of this is edible,” said Yennefer as she unceremoniously shoved open the door of Jaskier’s bedchamber, Geralt emerging behind her with a breakfast platter.

“You cooked?” Jaskier asked, managing to hoist himself into an upright position with minimal slights to his dignity. Minimal being a very generous application of the word, only because he had very very little dignity left. “Also, genuinely, will you ever learn to knock?”

“No on both counts,” said Yennefer. Her utter inability to look anything less than ready to stroll into a ballroom grew more tedious to look at the more that Jaskier felt better suited to a barnyard hovel.

He had always been a vain man, taking great pains to preen and primp his appearance to suit the carefully cultivated public image of himself. His clothing was so precisely tailored that barely a day of this pregnancy had passed before not a single item fit. No matter how Yennefer had designed the working, it had not been with a body like his in mind, far too narrow-hipped to allow the child and associated internal plumbing to be cradled by his pelvis. Not enough fat deposits distributed in the correct places for both of their comfort, and the strange hormonal and physical shift taking place in his body had erased none of his maleness.

He peered into the gilded mirror above the fireplace in his bedchamber. With a deepening five o clock shadow and swollen gut, he looked more like a pot-bellied tavern leech than an expectant father.

Jaskier avoided looking into the mirror.

This morning, he had woken to discover that the growing size of his lower abdomen meant that he could no longer see his own dick to piss. Thankfully, he had a working knowledge of the mechanics and location of said anatomy by now and could manage his own bodily functions just fine. Though the compounding difficulties of a drastically shifted center of gravity that complicated rising with any swiftness from bed and a bladder compressed and abused by an acrobatic and relentless unborn child meant that that there had been some harrowing moments of that nature.

Luckily, for now, the child rested quietly within him.

The incredibly brief amount of time that Jaskier had had to adjust to such verbiage meant that thinking such a thing still filled him with a dizzying mix of apprehension and disbelief, tinged with awe.

He slept very little, imagining that he could feel the stretch and settle of his internal anatomy as the fetus grew. The thought of the gory process itself made him feel somewhat queasy, so he took to embellishing it all with whatever poetic cliches he could muster. Here he was, a simple human man of some regard, whose body was now graciously and impossibly serving as the life support system for an actual developing person. With limbs and toes and hair follicles and such.

Oh god, he hoped the child had the appropriate number of all of the above.

“Geralt cooked,” said Geralt, settling the steaming tray across what remained of Jaskier’s lap. “Promise it’s all edible. Yen seems to think I’ve never cooked over anything but an open fire.”

“Well, you’ve never cooked me breakfast before.”

“You usually have hired help for that.”

“I don’t even need hired help for that. I could flick my fingers and call a five course feast into existence.”

“I know you hate illusory food, Yen.”

“With good reason. Food cooked by hand does not leave a sour taste in your mouth.”

“It’s the romance of it all,” Jaskier pointed out, shoving sausage links and poached egg into his mouth. “Breakfast in bed is incredibly romantic.”

“Chew your food, bard,” said Yennefer. “I’ve seen farm animals with better table manners.”

He didn’t quite hide his wince over how closely the insult dug at his own thoughts of himself. He presumed due to a trick of the hormonal cocktail swirling in his body, he had become largely unsuccessful at hiding or stuffing down emotions of any magnitude.

Seemingly not so far removed from the usual, but Jaskier’s high-flung dramatics were a _choice_ made for best attention-grabbing theatricality. The tears that pricked hot at the corner of his eyes now were not ideal.

He coughed, blaming any eye-watering on his best attempts to choke himself on his breakfast.

Sniffles over a single, pointed insult would earn him no sympathy here. These two frighteningly beautiful and powerful near-immortals had no use for a simpering little man who teared up over middling slights. They couldn't possibly have much use for him at all, beyond his sudden and impossible ability to play surrogate.

And wasn’t that just the long and short of it? Here he was, his vanity and hopeless sentimentality put at odds with his desperate craving to be paid attention to. To not be forgotten.

His impulsive and foolish choice to see this pregnancy through had been conceived and finalized not after careful tossing and turning, not after he felt the first winged flutter of the babe inside him, but after seeing Yennefer and Geralt flickering in candlelight, all eyes on him as the antidote to his problem was presented.

Foolish! Horribly daft! Their doting and rapt attention now served only to remind Jaskier that it was a means to an end, that the child would be born and the lovely couple would learn ways to be happy together, that he would find himself outside their cozy family unit, relegated to the sidelines if he were invited at all.

Nevermind that he didn’t care for the thought of being a father. His own had been distant and pragmatic, his mother politely supportive, his extended family built on empty platitudes and threadbare customs. He didn’t know how one was meant to be a father, especially in his strange case.

He had come to feel something for the babe that wriggled in disquieting ways beneath his skin, but for all his verse and language, he struggled to quantify it. She had yet to exist in his mind as anything but an abstraction, a sliver of his own self and yet wholly separate.

He wasn’t quite certain of the moment when he began to call the child _she_.

He spoke to her sometimes, at first in grumbling chastisement over her somersaults while he made attempts at napping, and then, in whispered tales of the life she would have, all decadently overembellished and rife with cliches.

But at their heart, always a grain of truth.

 _You will be born as loved as a princess,_ he whispered, running his fingers back and forth along the crux of his stomach. _You will live by the sea, and your mother will braid ribbon into your hair each morning with a word. Your father will teach you to know the names of woodland flowers. You will sleep by firelight each night and wake to a sweet breeze off the horizon each morning._

He had no way of knowing how this child’s life would truly go. Neither of her parents knew any more than Jaskier about what it would mean to be one. The world had gone to shit or always had been so. There was war and darkness and endless monsters.

Being only a vain and simple human man of some regard and little integrity, Jaskier had no hope of navigating fatherhood in such a climate. The sorceress and the Witcher, meanwhile, were brave and powerful and stubbornly defiant. At the very least, the two of them would grit their teeth and give it their all. At best, he knew that Yennefer would claw belly-down across the stinking pits of hell and that Geralt would remain locked in battle to the very last firing of his neurons to keep this child safe.

It would be enough. Jaskier felt plainly the marrow-deep truth of it.

This child would be loved.

Being a desperately needy and sentimental and selfish man meant that rather than feel warm and fuzzy over such a thing, Jaskier felt mainly a sinking ache of forlorn jealousy.

And in his present amplified emotional state, his traitorous body was woefully unable to repress it.

Swallowing down the last of the sausage and eggs and warmed bread which Geralt had prepared for him and licking the grease and crumbs from his fingers, Jaskier began to cry in earnest.

"Shit," he cursed, voice cracking over the helpless well of tears. He had always been an unreasonably hideous cryer when taken by genuine sentiment. Snot and heaving and pitiful wailing and all. "Ah, piss, don't mind me I'm just--"

"Hormonal," said Yennefer with no shortage of amusement, settled in a nearby armchair.

Geralt hovered awkwardly in shuffling discomfort, and Jaskier willed his body to calm down and obey him and from now on, only launch into dramatics when he was likely to earn the cooing reassurance of a tender lover, rather than mockery and humiliation.

Unfortunately, he instead was taken by lurching hiccups along with his sobs.

"Jask--" Geralt held up his hands as though placating a wounded animal, looking bewildered and more than a little bit constipated, and proceeded to choose that moment of all moments to be a big, stupid, brave idiot and leaned to wrap Jaskier in an embrace. Which, of course, drove his sobs to an alarming new pitch.

"Now you've done it," laughed Yennefer as the Witcher tensed in helpless confusion. Shifting as though to draw back again, Jaskier clung to the Witcher with all his might, shoving his snot-afflicted face against him and panting in ragged gasps. Geralt was warm and solid and smelled of Yennefer's perfume. They had hugged before, of course, in the way of travel companions reuniting after time apart or tavern buddies clapping each other on the arms when drink loosened their affections, but never as an open show of comfort.

If Jaskier was to be utterly humiliated in new and unforeseeable ways, he would be a fool not to milk it for every last drop.

Geralt gradually unclenched as much as he was able, and Jaskier steadied his breathing in turn, soothed by the slow rhythm of the Witcher’s heartbeat against his cheek. After a time, the hormonal surge seemed to pass him by, and he reluctantly leaned away, pink-cheeked and dry-eyed, only errant hiccups remaining of his outburst.

“Right then,” he said, coughing awkwardly. “Now that that happened… is there anything else you needed? I’m not feeling up for banter this morning, as it were.”

“No,” said Geralt, slow to drop his arms and step back. He seemed endearingly reluctant to do so, which nearly inspired a fresh well of tears. "We'll go. You sure you'll alright?"

"Oh don't set him off again," said Yennefer as Jaskier whimpered.

"Yes, yes, you big oaf, I'm fine and dandy. Very happy to wallow in my humiliation without spectators."

"Go on," said Yennefer. "Go down to the stables. I know you're missing that mare of yours. I have some words for the bard. No, no, don't look so alarmed. He won't come to any harm. Polite and brief discussion, I promise. Go, Witcher."

With a curt nod, Geralt turned aside and obeyed.

Leaving he and Yennefer alone, the sorceress poised in an easy show of elegance in her high-backed armchair, all long, crossed legs and artful lean that somehow managed to look both effortless and threatening.

"Stayed to gloat? Gawk? Throw peanuts like I am some animal likely to perform tricks?"

Though he had stopped the fitful hitching of his breath, he still found himself interrupted every so often by a spasm of his diaphragm. To make matters worse, the earlier fuss had excited the babe and driven her to attempt new and fanciful athletic feats against his tender internal organs.

"Mmmm, yes, more entertaining than the circus, I must admit."

"Please, Yennefer, leave me to suffer in peace."

"I don't hate you, you know."

The confession was spoken with a matter of fact, easy air, deeply contrasted to his whining pleas. All of her appearance and composure felt at odds with his. He tried not to burn with jealousy and failed miserably. She was beautiful. And mysterious. Jaskier didn't know a thing about her, not really.

"And what of it?”

"If I did hate you, I wouldn't say what I'm about to say. I would allow you to continue thinking your pathetic little thoughts and go on your way when this is over."

"Oi, get out of my head.”

“I rarely intend on reading minds, but your thoughts and emotions are boiling over at the moment. I can’t blame you. This must be very distressing.” Jaskier blinked at her, startled by her sincerity. “It’s often better not to know the truths that others think of you. I have overheard far worse in regard to myself than anything you could ever conjure up.”

“Am I meant to feel bad for you?”

“Never,” said Yennefer. “Now would you quit distracting me, I’m trying to say--” She exhaled a breath through her nose. "You are a pathetic man. You're endlessly vain. Your shrieking could give a deaf man a headache. Your poetry is a dreadful accumulation of trite cliches and common drivel.”

"Not exactly getting a 'I don't hate Jaskier' vibe here, Yennefer."

"You're possibly the most infantile, irritating adult man I've ever had the displeasure of interacting with for any length of time," she said. "But truthfully, there’s far worse you could be. I’ve been in close proximity to the most putrid, stinking muck of the Continent. Egotistical, self-important men whose cruelty knows no boundaries. But you’re ultimately harmless. Like a niggling insect.”

“ _Really_ feeling uncertain you know what ‘don’t hate’ means.”

“To Geralt, you are… someone important. He loves you the same as you love him. Possibly more than he could ever love me."

"That's not true," said Jaskier.

"I hurt him," said Yennefer. "In Rinde. Used him as a tool. Left him for dead. Some part of him may never wholly forgive me for something like that. And he shouldn't. I likely shouldn't forgive myself. You don’t carry the same dark stain in his eyes."

"You didn't know him," said Jaskier, for want of something to say. He didn't have a clue where this conversation was headed.

He was beginning to get a sense of how Geralt must feel around Yennefer the majority of the time. Just when Jaskier thought he had her pinned down, Yennefer changed shape. It was disarming.

It was illuminating, some sense of the cruelty she had endured echoed in her behavior, in her callous treatment of him and the careful obscuration of who she really was.

"Don't make excuses for me. I wouldn't in your place."

"Eh, bygones and all that," said Jaskier. "I don't hate you either, Yennefer. Not the way I used to."

"Why?" she asked, though he knew she could divine the answer as easily as she had his insecurities.

"The same as you. You're important to Geralt. I see the way he looks at you. I know what you feel for one another."

"Did you know that he wasted his last djinn wish to save my life?"

Jaskier laughed. "Of course he did. That's who he is. He forgave you for what you did to him the moment he ran back into that house. Probably before that."

"The brave fool."

It was then that Jaskier had the prickling realization that Yennefer often said things like "fool" and "idiot" in the manner one would a reluctantly fond endearment.

He smiled.

“Oh dear, you really are completely gone for him, aren’t you?”

“Shut it, bard. That’s not all I had to say here. Quit changing the subject.”

“Go on then. Tell me.”

“Geralt cares for you,” said Yennefer. “He’s been a wreck worried for you.”

“You don’t think I know that already? Of course he has been. I’ve been his stalwart travel companion for decades, after all.”

“You say that you know that,” she said, “but your thoughts tell a different story. You fear that he worries only for the life of the unborn child. That he cares for you now as a means to an end. That he would turn you aside the moment that life offers him what he truly wants, what he never thought he could have.”

Jaskier shifted in discomfort.

“Ouch,” he said. “Well you didn’t have to put it so plainly, did you?”

“Even feeling such fears, you would do something like this for us. You would sacrifice your bodily autonomy and endure discomfort, even fearing that you may never be as important to Geralt as he is to you. Why?”

Again, he was certain she knew his answer already or could glimpse it easily in his overflowing thoughts. No matter. Perhaps even someone like Yennefer carried her own insecurities. For as little as they liked one another, Jaskier had no qualms about assuaging them.

“Because I care about his happiness. I want that life for him,” he said. “That’s what love is. Or should be. I won’t claim to be anything approaching selfless, but I do know that much.”

Yennefer contemplated him, looking the picture of composure, no insights into what she was thinking.

“You’re a better man than most,” she said at last.

“Mmm, I’d love to have that on record if possible. Could you say that again when Geralt’s around? Just to have a witness. No one would ever believe me.”

“You’re ruining the moment, bard.”

“Right, right, sorry, but there’s just one thing I don’t understand. Why do you care? Why would you bother to reassure me? Doesn’t it benefit you if you sent me on my merry way after all of this is over?”

“Have you been listening? You really think so little of Geralt? Of me?” Her voice took on a pointed sharpness. “Do you think we would simply lock you out of this child’s life after you endured this for us? Or do you really mean to turn aside from your own offspring? The way Geralt’s mother did with him. The way my own parents did.”

“No,” said Jaskier, unsettled by her show of vulnerability. Knowing what it must cost her. “Of course not. But I’m not suited to fatherhood. I don’t know how--”

“You think either of us do? Do you think anyone truly does?”

“Suppose you’re right,” he muttered.

“It’s your choice,” Yennefer said with finality. “We won’t chain you here to watch her grow. We won’t guilt or pressure you anywhere that you don’t wish to stay. But to be loved by three people… any of us could only be so lucky.”

Jaskier fought against the near crippling surge of warmth that her honest words inspired, choosing instead to focus on one interesting detail of her speech rather than allow the overwhelming sentiment to send him into sobs again.

“Her?” he asked.

He allowed a smug and knowing smile, and Yennefer responded by, of all surprising and endearing things, turning noticeably pink across her cheeks even as she frowned in return.

“The child. What have you. You know what I meant.”

“Come here, Yen,” he said, beckoning.

“Why?”

She did not stand to approach the bed but did straighten her casual lean and uncross her legs.

“Come feel her. I think she’s doing her level best at the moment to-- ouch-- rearrange my internal organs into shapes she finds more pleasing. Very much your daughter, this one.”

The flush coloring Yennefer’s cheeks deepened. To his immense surprise, rather than escalate into stubborn denial as he expected, Yennefer stood abruptly and took a seat beside him at the edge of the bed. There, she stalled, looking as clumsy as he had ever seen her, her hands folded down into her lap.

Slowly, so slowly it felt almost comical, Jaskier reached to take both hands in his. He was struck by how small they were and how smooth, not a single callous on the soft palms. He had expected the latter, everyone knowing that ascended sorceresses were removed of all physical flaws.

All the greater was his surprise when he slid his guiding fingers down to curl around her wrists and met the torn ridges of raised scars.

He said nothing, knowing there were few reasons why scars like that would have occurred in such a vulnerable place and fewer reasons why Yennefer would not will them to fade. He allowed a sweep of his thumb along each of the marks as he drew her hands to spread across his belly and pretended not to notice the hitch of her breath.

The babe within him lurched against the press of Yennefer’s palms.

“She’s saying hello,” said Jaskier, and bizarrely, confoundingly, bafflingly, a few streaks of tears hurried down Yennefer’s cheeks and hung at the edge of her jawline. “Oh. Oh dear, I’m--”

“Don’t say a word, you idiot,” said Yennefer and jerked her hands away to get control of herself, rubbing away the tears. “Castration is not off the table.”

He wanted to reach for her. Never had it been said that Jaskier held a lick of self-preservation, so he reached.

She could not hide a flinch when his fingers touched her cheeks, carefully cradling without constraint, leaving her free to shift back from him.

She did not shift back.

Jaskier had the distinct feeling of hovering somewhere outside of his body, almost certainly dreaming rather than experiencing something as inexplicable as Yennefer of Vengerberg opening up to this weakness. In front of him of all people. He had never expected such a thing, had not ever thought Yennefer capable of tears at all, let alone like this. He had thought her cold-hearted and aloof and incapable of being taken by emotion.

But then again, he realized now that he didn’t know her. Not really.

His thumbs swept to catch fresh tears under the line of her violet eyes. Her chin wobbled.

He found that he would like to. Was beginning to. Know her.

“I was right,” he said quietly. “You'll be a wonderful mother.”

And he knew enough now to expect the deepening hitch of her breath, the involuntary crumple of her expression, and Jaskier was just foolish enough to reach and tug her closer, holding this strange woman in the grounding clutch of an embrace.

* * *

In the aftermath, the two of them sat in stiff and awkward silence beside one another in the four poster bed.

Yennefer had not expected a thing like that, for the touch of the babe against her hand to inspire such a manifestation of emotions that she could not quite stop from spilling over. Perhaps it had been a reflection of Jaskier’s own emotional distress. She had not cried in front of anyone since she was a girl.

Even so, she took assurance in the fact that if the bard had wanted to mock her and use this weakness against her, he would have already. In her life, her weaknesses had so often been used against her. It was alarming to find no inkling of anything of the sort in Jaskier’s thoughts. His genuine lack of ill will toward her rose as free and clear as the open pages of a book.

Yennefer now surely looked as puffy-eyed and red-rimmed as Jaskier did, and she tried her damndest not to dwell on it, beating back the rising swell of discomfort at being seen so out of sorts. Maybe if neither acknowledged it, this embarrassing incident would all go away. Fade into the annals of memory. Be promptly and blessedly forgotten.

Seeing the sickeningly tender way that the bard now looked at her, she knew that such a hope was fleeting and highly unlikely.

“Oh, would you quit looking at me like that?” she snapped. “I still could remove your cock from your body and keep it as a jarred curiosity for visitors to gawk at.”

“I know,” said Jaskier, irritatingly smug. “But I have it on good authority that you won’t. Because you like me too much.”

Nostrils flaring, she fought the overwhelming desire to make good on her threats. She knew an illusory spell or two that could do the work of frightening him into humility.

“I would think someone in your condition would not tempt further loss of their manhood.”

Jaskier shrugged.

“A man of my age and proclivities doesn’t have much worry about emasculation left,” he said. “It’s not shameful. Being less than what society presumes a man should be.”

“Insightful,” said Yennefer. “How progressive.”

“I am intimately in touch with my inner femininity,” sighed Jaskier, a hand pressed to his chest. “I’m comfortable in my manhood. Willing to be vulnerable. Open to--”

“Yes, yes, can we stop the prattling?”

“No. I’m being emotionally and openly honest here. We’re having a moment, Yennefer. A shared, vulnerable moment.”

“I’ll share with you a vulnerable moment,” said Yennefer.

“It’s no weakness to feel emotion. To weep. I should know, I do so at least once a day.”

“You realize that’s not a terribly convincing argument. Also, please shut up.”

“I don’t think I will,” said Jaskier. “I’m beginning to believe you don’t really want me to. This may be presumptuous but I have the suspicion that you--”

Putting aside all reservations, common sense, and potential, disastrous consequences, Yennefer relented to a newfound desire that she had not predicted could ever possibly exist and leaned forward to kiss him.

The bard went quiet, his mouth soft and pliant against hers.

Yennefer did not understand it, the ways that he had snuck so surreptitiously and easily and abruptly under her skin, but there he was all the same.

The kiss was a simple thing, dry and warm, more demonstrative than titillating. Her fingers touched the round of his chin, prickled by the few days growth of stubble there. She held the kiss for a long held breath, knowing that parting would mean she would have to explain herself. She knew she would have to put words to her intentions. To her desires.

Yennefer pulled back to find Jaskier’s eyes hooded with shocked pleasure, his lips parted, cheekbones pinked with a blush. Her hand remained where it was, thumb fitting into the space below his lower lip, pleased to see how neatly it fit there.

“There we are,” she said for want of something to say, hoping to head off any yammering. “Blessed silence.”

“Well,” he breathed, voice pitched high, “that’s something then.”

“I suppose it would be wishful thinking of me to presume that method will work every time.”

“Frankly wouldn’t mind testing it,” mumbled Jaskier, staring in blatant interest at her lips.

Contrary to her better judgment, Yennefer leaned close again, meeting his open mouth with a more demanding intensity. Jaskier responded to her with no shortage of enthusiasm, hands fumbling around her upper arms, hanging on. He startled when her hand dropped to the swell of his abdomen and held there.

Something primal and possessive burned low in her belly as she felt the shift of the child beneath her palm. _Her_ child. The rush of arousal that seized her at the thought was nearly painful.

“Not that I’m-- _eep_ , not that I’m not enjoying this, Yennefer,” said Jaskier in between increasingly heated kisses. “Honestly, I’m enjoying this very much but what exactly is-- oh bugger, what would Geralt-- _Geralt_!”

The rush of cold as he flung himself back from her was nearly as startling as her apparent attraction to him.

“What is it?” she asked. He was wide-eyed and appeared stricken, holding himself away.

“You and Geralt are-- and he’s not-- and I’m-- oh dear, I won’t make a cuckold of him, you know. No matter how much I would like to continue kissing you.”

The conviction of his words was somewhat dulled by the way he continued to stare with unguarded arousal at Yennefer’s lips. She expected that his heightened hormonal state was not making a clear head easy for him.

“You--” She snatched up one of the feather pillows from the bed and raised it menacingly. It was vaguely satisfying to see how quickly Jaskier cowered, hands raised. She smacked him once across his raised arms, just to hear him yelp. “Have you been listening to nothing--” Another smack. “--that I have been saying--” Another. “--this entire time?”

“No!” he shouted. “No, apparently not! What are you-- Yennefer! Stop it!”

She stopped and restrained her frustration with difficulty, fingers clenching in the soft down of the pillow. Unlike with Geralt, she would have to put words to this and not simple actions. Jaskier was a man of words.

“Earlier, I thought I made it clear,” said Yennefer. “Geralt loves you. As he loves me. So of course he… Do you have any idea how often he’s dreamed of this very thing? Of you and I… getting along?”

“I’d say we’ve gone a touch beyond just--”

“Whatever. Semantics. I’ve been privy to most of Geralt’s fantasies. This--” She gestured between them. “--is well within the scope of his desires.”

“Alright,” said Jaskier, swallowing hard, gaze still settled on her mouth. “Ok. Good. So. I’m guessing it’s in the scope of yours also?”

“No, I kissed you simply to sate the whims of the man I am romantically entangled with,” Yennefer drawled.

“Erm,” said Jaskier. “So do you--”

“Yes, I desire you! Somehow. The gods know why.”

“I know why,” he said with fresh smugness.

“Wonderful. I predict you’re going to tell me?”

“It’s because I’m carrying your--”

Yennefer gave into her more pressing desire of beating him about the head and shoulders with the pillow in her hands, quite pleased indeed by the whining shrillness of his muffled protests.

* * *

  
After a good hour or so spent currying a fresh shine into Roach’s chestnut coat, after which he had stood in the dusty silence of the stables and leaned against the mare’s neck, comforted by the warmth and hay-smell of her, Geralt was disconcerted not to find Yennefer in any of her usual places.

The bedchamber he had been sharing with her, the laboratory, and her study all stood empty and quiet. Resigned to see her whenever she chose to reappear, batting back the feeling of being a forlorn dog hunting for its absent master, he had the thought to check the bard’s bedchamber.

And there she was.

Partially-obscured by the gauzy curtains of the four-poster bed, Yennefer and Jaskier slept soundly together, curled face to face. Some distance remained between them, but one of Yennefer’s arms rested across the round of Jaskier’s abdomen, a hand laid on his bare hip where his sleep shirt rucked up.

Geralt’s eyes caught on that unexpected show of intimacy. It should not feel so alarming, the sight of her small, brown hand cupped around the pale ridge of Jaskier’s hipbone.

He cleared his throat loudly.

Yennefer’s eyes snapped open, and Jaskier stirred groggily beside her.

“Oh, hello Geralt,” said Jaskier through a yawn, “did I fall asleep? What time is it? Just fancied a bit of a lie down. A bit of a midday nap.”

“With Yennefer?”

He blinked at Yennefer beside him, her arm shrugged low over his stomach.

“Well, yes. That’s a regular thing I do, yes, of course. Very usual and normal. Er… nap with Yennefer.”

“Ok,” said Geralt. “What the fuck is going on?”

More alarmingly still, the pair shared a lengthy, wordless glance before Yennefer rose from bed and went to him, touching his arm.

The hair on the side of her head where she had been lying was slightly frizzed, but otherwise, she looked as calm and cool as usual, her black and white dress falling to settle around her legs.

“So,” said Yennefer carefully, which did nothing to ease his sudden surety that something was about to go up in flames. “I’ve… spoken with Jaskier this afternoon at length.” Even less soothing to Geralt’s anxiety was her slight hesitation over the word _spoken_. His slow heartbeat thudded more swiftly. “Oh hush, you’re just as dramatic as he is. Nothing untoward happened. All his pieces and parts are where they’re meant to be. But listen, my dear, we have a proposition for you.”

Geralt glanced at Jaskier who had not bothered to go through the trouble of pushing himself upright in bed. He offered a thumbs up.

“She’s not lying to you, Geralt,” he said. “We did talk. And… erm.” He fiddled with the edge of the bed linens, suddenly awkward.

Yennefer rolled her eyes.

Geralt stared in settling confusion.

“You… talked,” he said.

“About the future,” said Yennefer, “and our desires.”

The cogs of his brain ground against one another.

“She told me some things,” said Jaskier.

“Things,” Geralt deadpanned.

“Well. And she kissed me.”

Geralt looked at Yennefer, who laughed at his dumbfounded expression.

“What? He’s not lying.”

He stared helplessly between the both of them, absent every inch of his usual shrewdness. They flayed his defenses and defied his expectations well enough on their own. With forces combined, he had no hope of maintaining his composure. Perhaps he’d been wrong about wishing they would finally bury their animosity and find common ground. The reality of it was far too overwhelming.

“Ah, oh dear,” said Jaskier. “He’s overstimulated again. Geralt, don’t think so hard. Your face will stick that way.”

“I don’t understand,” Geralt managed to say.

“That’s fairly obvious.”

“You… talked,” he said. “There was kissing?”

“Of course you would focus on that,” said Yennefer. A sharp, lacquered fingernail trailed down the meat of his arm. “But listen Geralt, that proposition.”

A million likely scenarios and requests spun in his head, each more confounding than the last.

“Oh take pity on the man, Yen, he may hurt himself.”

 _Yen?_ Geralt had never known anyone but him to freely call her that without being rebuked, but Yennefer didn’t flinch.

“When this child is born, we will share equally the responsibilities of parenthood,” said Yennefer. “All three of us.”

“Yeah,” he said, brow creasing more deeply still. “That’s how these things tend to work.”

“Geralt, I know you had an unusual go of it childhood-wise, but there aren’t ordinarily _three_ parents.”

“There are in this case.”

“Yes but--”

“Jaskier’s the father. Didn’t realize that was something up for debate.”

“Well. Technically, genetically I’m not the--”

“What’s the other option, then?” asked Geralt. “You fuck off afterwards? Leave your own kid behind?”

“That was the thought, yeah. Though when you put it like that, it sounds much less noble,” said Jaskier. “What you and Yen have… wouldn’t want to get in the way of that.”

“You get in the way all the time.”

“Ah yes but going forward, I wouldn’t-- or I would now, after our nice little chat but-- I thought, you know-- that is, I had assumed-- ah fuck, Yen?”

Jaskier floundered to sit up in bed, and Yennefer stepped closer to allow him to grip her hand to right himself. The intimacy of the gesture sent alarm bells ringing in his mind.

Their hands remained entangled. His attention caught on the little strokes of Jaskier’s thumb against the back of Yennefer’s hand.

“I think what this babbling idiot would like to say, if he had the faculties to do so, is that he would like you to join us in bed.”

“I was gone for two fucking hours,” Geralt grunted.

“Weeks in terms of this whole situation,” said Jaskier with a wave of his hand. “Things have been going a bit fast for me in general.”

“Aren’t you tired of napping?”

“We’re talking about sex, Geralt!” Jaskier snapped. “I know that your little Witcher brain requires a much more repetitive and lengthy conversation to be fully convinced of anything, but I swear by every god, I’m so fucking horny I could just perish on the spot.”

“Then do it,” drawled Yennefer, even as she ran her fingers into his hair, nails scratching along his scalp. Jaskier whined.

“Get in bed, please. Both of you.”

Yennefer promptly dropped the straps of her dress down each shoulder and allowed it to pool at her feet as she stepped naked to hitch herself onto the bed and over Jaskier’s body to stretch out beside him. Jaskier patted the empty space on his other side. His expression earnest. Hopeful. Not showing as much of the weariness as he had of late.

Geralt obeyed without further thought but stalled at the edge of the mattress, simply looking. The mage leaned against the bard’s shoulder, her long legs entangling with his in the disheveled blankets, her lips hovering close to the skin of his neck, one hand pressed low on his stomach and slipping under the oversized tunic.

As if all of this were commonplace.

“He is thinking how good we look together,” said Yennefer in the bard’s ear. Either her quiet words or her small hand splayed across the swell of his abdomen inspired Jaskier to breath out a shuddering exhale that gave to a moan.

“I wasn’t,” said Geralt.

“Yes, he was still thinking how strange this is,” said Yennefer, and her lips pressed against the hinge of Jaskier’s jaw. Her violet eyes met Geralt’s as Jaskier’s fluttered shut. “Now he’s thinking how good we look.”

“Geralt,” breathed Jaskier, “come here.”

He was helpless but to obey, pulling his shirt over his head and tossing it the gods knew where as his knees sank into the plush mattress. There, he paused again, distinctly aware of how much he smelled like the stables, how dirty his hands were, how too-big and clumsy his body felt.

With Yennefer, he rarely thought about his strength, their contrast in size, preferring that she push and pull him wherever she saw fit, but with Jaskier, he had always been careful. Rarely touching unless necessary, restraining himself from the usual affectionate pats and shoves and tugs that marked his other male friendships. Jaskier had always been different. Not just in his mortality but in his importance. Something more fragile in the thing that they shared.

Geralt floundered, his hands loose at his side as he kneeled, unable to make himself reach for him.

“He’s being an idiot in there,” said Yennefer.

“Isn’t he always?”

“He’s musing over how tiny and frail and human you are.”

“Geralt! Look at me.” Jaskier gestured over his lower body. “I am the size of an ox. I’m hardly tiny.”

Geralt eyes caught on the unfamiliar round of his abdomen. He did not know enough about typical human gestation to say how advanced the unborn child was, how close to full-term. How small and endlessly fragile was the life stirring beneath the press of Yennefer’s palm?

“Oh, you’ve made it worse,” said Yennefer.

“Geralt, come _here_ ,” whined Jaskier, and Geralt could do nothing but give to him, the same as he always had, urged on with no small amount of thigh kicking on Yennefer’s part.

He shuffled in and leaned, one arm braced over Jaskier’s shoulder, and dropped to meet him in the upward surge of a kiss. He tried to still the frantic edge with a slow shift of his jaw, Jaskier panting against his mouth. Tentative and careful, his palm spread beside Yennefer’s on the curve of his abdomen.

Geralt willed himself not to think of anything but Jaskier’s mouth against his, the warmth of Yennefer beside him and faltered, failing miserably.

This was too fragile.

Their years-long friendship, Jaskier’s brief human lifespan, the tentative thing the both of them shared with Yennefer, the impossible babe that kicked against the touch of his scarred fingers, the daydreams of a life together that he did not dare allow to coalesce into a solid plan.

“Geralt,” breathed Jaskier, holding Geralt’s face cupped in both hands, not needing Yennefer to clue him in to the spiral of anxieties in his head. “Please, _please_ , stop thinking.”

And at last, Geralt sighed against his mouth and did his best.

* * *

The next days passed in a blur both rushed and languid, none of them straying far from the four-poster bed.

Despite the limitations of Jaskier’s condition, the sex proved athletic, adventurous, and at times outright deviant, the bard and the mage taking great delight in flustering Geralt’s not usually so delicate sensibilities.

Yennefer did not gentle her touch where Jaskier was concerned, no qualms about giving to his insistent begging for rough treatment. At first, Geralt refused to touch the curves and angles of Jaskier’s body with anything short of careful reverence, until spurred on by Yennefer’s low-spoken demands, instructing the Witcher how the bard best liked to be manhandled, reassuring him by voicing the pleased spill of Jaskier’s thoughts aloud.

In turn, Jaskier lounged back against the pillows to offer suggestions on how exactly he would like to see Yennefer take Geralt apart, the magicked cock jutting between her legs disappearing between Geralt’s spread thighs, Jaskier’s hands soothing across Geralt’s scarred shoulders as he grunted and lapped at the crease of Jaskier’s own thighs.

Yennefer did not shy away from fixating on what had brought them together, Geralt’s face heating as bright red as his slowed heart rate allowed over the filthy things that Yennefer spoke to Jaskier as she clutched at his belly. How if he desired, she could repeat this turn of events more purposefully and keep him here indefinitely, bred and full and heavy with her unborn children.

Even through Geralt’s discomfort over how lewd and wrong the words felt, he watched Jaskier’s full body shudder as his orgasm took him, ejaculate streaking against Yennefer’s hands where they rested on his taut stomach and felt a fierce wave of arousal take him as well.

And at times, they rested in stillness together, snugged close under the blankets, giving to tactile impulses to learn the shape of each other’s bodies, their ticklish spots, the sounds they made in their sleep.

Jaskier snored dreadfully and drooled all over whatever pillowed his head, most often Geralt’s chest or Yennefer’s stomach. Yennefer twitched often with bad dreams, settling sometimes if Jaskier whispered a lullaby against her hair and Geralt stroked down the plane of her straightened spine. Geralt struggled to drift off to sleep unless Yennefer pressed close behind him, their arms wrapped together around Jaskier’s abdomen.

None of them knew for certain how long they had until their lives would change even more irreparably, the unborn babe developing with both swiftness and painful slowness.

* * *

Not quite a full week since the conception, Jaskier woke in the night with a lurch of pain, dazed and clammy, and cried out their names.

His partners were awake in an immediate blur of motion as the lamps in the room flickered into brightness, Geralt bending low to soothe him as Yennefer pressed her palms flat against Jaskier’s stomach, tongues of light spilling from her fingers.

“Is this it?” Jaskier asked, voice strained as a throbbing ache clenched through his abdominals. A wave of dizzy fatigue took him, fumbling to grasp at Geralt’s arms.

Yennefer went pale.

“It’s not labor,” she said. Her splayed fingers trembled. “The working is putting too much strain on your body. Your exhaustion, your weakness, I should have noticed-- _fuck_. Your organs are failing.”

“Oh lovely. Wonderful. Just peachy,” Jaskier whined in shrill panic.

“So it is time. Whether we like it or not,” said Geralt, his strained and wide-eyed expression betraying his terror even as his voice remained steady. “You going to put him under? Start the delivery?”

Yennefer had studied various techniques for non-vaginal delivery and adapted the most likely candidate to her own magic signature. Everything had been prepared well in advance. All it would take was a muttered spell to place Jaskier in a temporary stasis, and the rest was equally uncomplicated, if requiring great magical talent.

A simple thing. Over within the hour.

Except.

The babe fluttered weakly against Yennefer’s hands, responding to the tendrils of probing magic within the constructed womb.

Too small. Impossibly small.

“She’s not full-term. Her lungs--”

“ _Fuck_ ,” breathed Jaskier, eyes rolling back against a sharp well of pain.

“What does that mean?” Geralt asked, stricken.

Yennefer’s magic curled around the unborn infant, feeling out the shape of her flexing limbs and stuttering heartbeat and then pressed farther into Jaskier’s body. His liver and kidneys hovered on the edge of total collapse, his heart thundering and lungs straining, his body breaking itself down to sustain the life that it was never meant to support. She should have guessed at this sooner. She should have known that this may happen.

She had allowed herself to be distracted, cocooned in the warmth of her newfound fondness for the bard, entangled in the saccharine dreams of the future and pleasure-filled haze of the present. If she had spent more time preparing and less time lost in her own desires, she may have prevented this.

“He’s dying,” said Yennefer, willing back her own surge of panic. “He’ll die if the working isn’t lifted as soon as possible but--”

“But she won’t survive,” said Geralt. Their eyes locked with an echo of the same marrow-deep fear.

There was a choice to be made.

* * *

In the midnight hush of the bedchamber, lamplight flickered against the plaster walls. The Witcher banked the fire by hand rather than with a spoken word. The mage paced in jerky movements beyond the foot of the bed, her nightshift whispering against her legs. Jaskier lay naked atop the bed linens, a sheen of sweat across his pale limbs, his hands fisted tight in the blankets as he blurred in and out of awareness.

The fire well-lit, Geralt slipped behind the frail man in the bed, allowing him to rest back against the solid plane of his chest. His lips touched to the crook of his shoulder felt like a poor comfort for the pain he endured, but it was all Geralt had to offer.

Yennefer did not take much longer in deciding, as she reeled to plant her feet wide, her violet eyes bright with tears, her mouth twisted in a grimace. She did not have to give voice to her decision, meeting Geralt's eye. The Witcher offered a tight nod.

“No, no, I feel just fine actually,” breathed Jaskier, eyes half-closed. “It can wait. Just a little while. Until she’s strong enough. I’ll be fine. Can’t you-- can’t you do anything?”

“Idiot.” Yennefer swept close and leaned over his body to press a dry kiss to his forehead. “I am doing something. I’m going to put you under now. It’s time.”

“No, you said that she won’t-- You said--” His voice grew increasingly pained and pitched high. “Don’t you _dare_.”

“I won’t make a choice that risks losing you both. I won’t allow you to martyr yourself.”

“Yennefer, please, I can’t-- Choose her.”

“No,” she said.

“ _Why?_ ”

“Because you’re important to me,” she snapped. “To both of us. I won’t lose you.” She began to mutter the incantation that would draw him into unconsciousness even as he struggled against it, her fingers tightening against the round of his stomach. The little life flexed inside. “But I won’t give up on her either.”

“Jaskier, stop fighting,” said Geralt, shrugged up behind him, white hair falling across the crown of Jaskier’s head as he struggled to force his eyes to uncross. “Trust her. I do.”

Somehow, impossibly, Jaskier did.

With a last sigh, he slumped in their arms, and a chilled and solid darkness closed over his head.

* * *

The child did not cry, grey and still in Yennefer’s arms.

"Geralt, take her. I need to complete the working. He’s fading."

"Yennefer--”

His rough hands suddenly cupped around an impossibly small infant, still wet and warm from the womb, though the delivery had involved none of the usual viscera. His fingers were thicker than the lines of her arms, her skull easily cradled in the meat of his palm.

His heart lurched.

She lay in silence, no movement, no breath.

“Yen. Yen, she’s not--”

“Then _make her_ ,” said Yennefer. “She’s my daughter! She won’t give up so easily.”

She didn’t.

Of infant resuscitation, Geralt knew only what Yennefer had had time to tell him as she leaned over Jaskier’s prone figure, but he spent only a few moments coaxing the delicate ribcage to expand before the pink mouth twisted and she began to wail. Her little limbs batted against his fingers, a fist catching along the girth of his thumb.

“Yen,” said Geralt, helpless, watching her kicking frog legs and wrinkled face.

“Get her warm,” Yennefer said, both palms still pressed flat to Jaskier’s abdomen, droplets of sweat on her brow.

He held the naked infant to his chest and tugged at the edge of the bed linens to swaddle her in them. Her sparse hair haloed in the glow from the fire. She blinked with a poorly-focused gaze at him, beet-red with the fury of her wavering screams.

“Shhh, shhh,” he soothed as he would a spooking horse. “Enough of that. You’re safe. Shhh.”

It was only as the child’s cries turned to whines and grunts that Geralt looked to the still figure slumped low against his torso.

Jaskier’s skin was as wan as the infant’s had been, his blue lips parted, Yennefer still hunched over his body.

“Come on, you bastard,” Yennefer demanded, giving to the crooked curl of her spine. "Shit, _shit_. I've dispelled the working, but he's not stabilizing. I should have expected this. I should have caught it sooner. I--"

She sat back on her heels and let her hands drop to her thighs. The man on the bed breathed in ragged sighs, his cheeks sunken and mouth slack, veined eyelids twitching.

"Yen," said Geralt, surprised by the waver in his own voice. He meant to say more, to ask what she would do, what would happen next but could not will himself to express it.

The warm days behind them so fresh in their clarity, he felt the days ahead shrink to a flat, lonely stretch of grey. The coast rippling with a sucking black tide. He and Yennefer and the child huddled against the cold in their drafty cottage and growing tense and souring as the winter stretched, fracturing along their poorly-stitched seams where the thread of another's life had once held them steady.

Yennefer, either listening to the grey static of his visions of the future or gripped by her own, made a frustrated noise and swept away the hot tears that wet her cheeks. She held her spine straight with a fresh determination and reached for the infant in Geralt's arms.

With the babe crooked to her own breast, wriggling and crying in protest at being disturbed, her mouth warped down with the threat of fresh tears. Her tremulous composure holding, she leaned to rest the warm bundle against the silent body before her, curling down around the both of them, resting her crumpled forehead against his.

"Jaskier," she breathed, feeling the weak rise and fall of his ribcage in her own chest, the babe squirming between them. "Jaskier, your daughter is just as whiny as you are, do you hear her?"

Geralt held his breath.

Meanwhile, the child tested her new lungs in earnest with a rising cry, and at last, Jaskier stirred.

He blinked into the haze of firelight as Yennefer sat back, her hands supporting the little thing that knocked feeble limbs against his chest, face scrunched in displeasure.

"Oh," said Jaskier, trembling as he lifted leaden arms to touch, his fingers clumsy, her body flushed and warm. "She is very noisy, isn't she?"

"Thank fuck," Yennefer swore and ducked to kiss him full on the mouth, the kiss soon growing heated, Jaskier leaning up to meet her.

"Is this appropriate?" grunted Geralt behind them, and Yennefer laughed, a sweet, clear sound, and leaned up to kiss him as well.

"Geralt, I've suffered an ordeal," breathed Jaskier. "I feel close to death. I'm dying. Yennefer can kiss me as much as she wants."

"You're not dying," said Yennefer. "You’ve stabilized. Thank _fuck_ for that." And kissed him again, deep and slow.

"There's an infant in the room," said Geralt, chastising tone belied by his expression of gentle adoration. Flattening his palms along Yennefer's shoulderblades, Geralt held all three of them in his arms the best that he was able.

Jaskier cooed at the wrinkled, pink babe on his chest, and Yennefer shushed her wailing cries.

Soothed, she quieted into sleep, Jaskier blinking back his own weariness.

"Rest," said Yennefer with a softness not even she had thought herself capable of, and in the warmth of their embrace, Jaskier obeyed.

"Hang on, I am not doing any breastfeeding."

"Jaskier."

"And we are _not_ calling her Roach," he said drowsily, knuckling Geralt's arm for emphasis, and slept.

* * *

The waves rolled in and out along the rocky crags of the coast as the windswept figures toed along the edge of the water. Smoke blew from the stone cottage on a nearby bluff, the sod roof of a low-slung stable just visible beyond it. Spring had not yet hit the pastureland in full force, sprigs of bobbing flowers swaying here and there, soon to erupt into a carpet of blooms.

Truthfully, it was still too cold for sensible wading in the ocean, but none of the rabble who lived in the little cottage could claim to be wholly sensible.

Geralt watched from the path that wound down amid the dunes as a cold wave crashed around Jaskier's ankles. The bard yelped and leapt back, catching Yennefer around the shoulders as though to fling himself into her arms, and she grumbled a word that parted the rush of foam around the both of them.

"Whew, that's fu-- that's cold!"

"Yes, as water tends to be when it is still winter. This was your idea, idiot."

"And you agreed to it. So you're partially to blame if I freeze to death."

"Your logic's a bit flawed, dear."

"My feet may just fall off. I'll have to walk on nubs, Yennefer. You'll have to carry me."

"Geralt will carry you."

"I won't."

"Ah! I'll learn to walk again to spite you both. I have to say I'm really not feeling the love here. I'm feeling a bit unloved."

"You'll feel a lot unloved if you don't stop clinging to me, Jaskier."

"I'm not clinging. I'm just showing affection. Am I not allowed to show affection to my wife?"

"We aren't married."

"Not by the laws of the land, no, but in the depths of my bosom, we are intertwined as deeply as any matrimonious--"

"I don't care how deep your bosom is, Jaskier. Stop clinging."

On the edge of the sand, the young girl that dawdled behind them cleared her throat.

"It's cold as shit," she said. "I'm going back home."

"Ciri!" Jaskier admonished, spinning back to face her. "Don't swear in front of the baby."

The toddler hitched against the older girl's hip stared in blue-eyed interest at her surroundings, chubby legs dangling, bundled excessively against the slight chill of the spring breeze.

"Don't swear at all," said Geralt as he rested a hand on the crown of Ciri's ash-blonde head. He took the girl from her arms, surprised as he always was by how much the toddler had grown. Each time he held her, he expected the feather-light infant she had been.. "I'll take her. Go on back."

His Child Surprise turned tail and ran up the path along the bluff, and Geralt watched her go, fighting back the sinking feeling that she would never feel at home here, that he had gone to her too late, that there were some traumas that even time and care could not overcome.

"Stop worrying so much," said Yennefer and stepped close to kiss the dimpled cheek of the babe in his arms. "She'll be just fine."

"Yes, leave some worrying for the rest of us," said Jaskier as he sidled up behind Yennefer and leaned his chin on her shoulder. She promptly shrugged him off. Unbothered, he pecked the corner of her mouth and the babe's forehead in turn.

It surprised Geralt less and less, the sight of them together. The relaxed ease of their postures. The warmth of the home they had built together. The weight of the babe in his arms.


End file.
